The death toll due to the deadliest earthquake in the history of Turkey and Syria have now reached 34,000 while search and rescue teams still continue to pull out bodies from the rubble as of press time.
A week after the devastating earthquake hit the region, the United Nations (UN) predicted that the death toll may peak at 50,000. According to officials, over 29,000 people died in Turkey while over almost 4,000 deaths have been recorded in neighboring Syria.
According to reports, the 7.8 magnitude earthquake left over 1M Turkish homeless in the middle of winter while around 80,000 are now recovering in hospitals.
Syria, on the other hand, continues to endure it’s the catastrophic aftermath and hasn’t updated their death toll for two days.
Rescuers, including teams from other countries, continued to search the rubble in finding additional survivors who could beat the increasingly long odds.
Those found alive, however, remained the rare exception.
Hope continues to fade in the eyes of Turkish and Syrian residents affected by the disaster that prompt countries around the world to deploy rescue teams in aid.
UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths, who visited both countries over the weekend said in a statement that Syrians have been left “looking for international help that hasn’t arrived.”
“We have so failed the people in north-west Syria. They rightly feel abandoned,” he said.
Griffiths said that it is the UN’s duty and obligation to correct this “failure” in the quickest and most efficient way possible.
“My duty and our obligation is to correct this failure as fast as we can,” Griffiths said.
Along with hopelessness, protest is growing in destroyed towns over a ‘failed’ government response and allegedly shoddy construction that has led to a number of arrests of contractors.
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