Major Updates: Turkey-Syria Earthquake – Combined death toll nears 44,000
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Raven Ruma
- . February 17, 2023
- . Update: February 18, 2023 1:22 am
The combined death toll from last week’s powerful earthquakes in Turkey and neighbouring Syria is nearing 44,000. While Turkish authorities say over 38,000 people are dead in the country, according to the UN and the Syrian government, at least 5,800 have been killed in the war-torn nation.
The UN is appealing for $1 billion in aid to support survivors in Turkey, in addition to an earlier appeal for nearly $400 million to help five million Syrians.
Major Updates
- Rescuers are continuing to find survivors in the rubble, even after more than ten days since the February 6 pre-dawn quake. Four men were pulled out of collapsed buildings alive in Turkey, after 260 hours.
- There have been more than 4,500 aftershocks since last week’s tremors, one every four minutes, state-run Anadolu agency quoted Orhan Tatar, general director of earthquake and risk reduction at Turkey’s disaster agency.
- According to the Bloomberg news agency, Turkey’s government now allows the country’s banks to donate urgent humanitarian aid to the victims without being subjected to limits set by the banking law. The exemption will be in force until the end of the three-month state of emergency President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared following the deadly February 6 tremor.
- The Syrian government forces and opposition groups clashed overnight in northwest Syria, in the first gunfire erupted since the devastating quakes hit the region last week, a UK-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said, adding no casualties have been reported yet.
- More than 100 UN aid trucks carrying tents, heaters, and cholera testing kits have crossed into the devastated northwest Syria since the earthquakes struck.
