Consider This from NPR - Two Versions Of The Same Nightmare: A Week In Quake-Hit Turkey and Syria

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

One week since arriving in southern Turkey after massive back-to-back earthquakes hit the region, our correspondent recounts what she has seen in seven days of covering the tragedy in Turkey and neighboring Syria.NPR's Ruth Sherlock traveled from Lebanon soon after the quakes hit, and has since reported from both Turkey and Syria. She says thousands of people in both countries are living versions of the same nightmare.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

One week ago, people in Turkey and northern Syria were having an ordinary night. They came home from work and shared meals with their families. Parents put their children to bed. In the Syrian town of Jinderis, Zakaria Tabakh cuddled his youngest boy, Abdel Hadi, who was two. I put him in my arms and slept with him. He lay Abdel Hadi on the little boy's bed and then slipped out to join his wife in their bedroom. I was sleeping beside my wife. I woke up. My wife was covered with rubble, ruins.

Tabakh's wife was dead beside him, killed by chunks of their ceiling that fell on the couple's bed. Their home had partially collapsed after an earthquake hit in the very early morning hours of February 6th. Tabakh ran to his children's room and pulled out five-year-old Abdul Wahab alive, but he found two-year-old Abdul Hadi motionless under the debris of a collapsed wall. He had died where he slept. I don't know how I got out. God must have pulled me out, Tabakh said. Outside their home, similar scenes were unfolding. Neighbors in nightdresses running through the rain in the darkness

calling for relatives in the rubble of collapsed homes. There was another strong quake and many aftershocks. Tabakh says few came to mourn with him and his surviving five-year-old son. Everyone is dead. Everyone is dead. People are so busy with their own cases, so nobody has the time to help the others. All of them are injured. All of them have deaths.

Consider this. One week after two major earthquakes devastated parts of Turkey and Syria, the death toll is in the tens of thousands and still climbing. One of our correspondents in the region asks, how can people even start to recover? From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Monday, February 13th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com.

T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. A week ago, when southern Turkey and northern Syria were hit by two massive earthquakes one after another, NPR's Ruth Sherlock was close by in Lebanon. Ruth reached the region quickly and has been there ever since, reporting on the devastation, the search and rescue efforts, and people's efforts to come to grips with what has happened. Ruth is now in Gaziantep, Turkey, and joins us to talk about everything she's seen in the last week. Hi, Ruth. Hi. One of the first places you reported from was the Turkish city of

Antakya. Can you describe what it was like just getting into the town? Right. Well, we were driving in as these ambulances were streaming out, the sirens wailing. And as we got closer and closer, we started to see the devastation. There was buildings collapsed. I mean, I even saw one of the hospitals of the city like tilted on its side, crumbling. And, you know, there were just people combing the rubble, some digging with their bare hands with shovels. And as we got close into the center, I realized why the scale of the devastation here is. It's like Armageddon. You know, I don't usually exaggerate, but I think that's an's like Armageddon. I don't usually exaggerate, but I think that's an appropriate description for this place.

I know this area very well, having reported here for years close to the border with Syria. There's thousands of Syrian refugees here, and I couldn't recognise a single street. We met one woman trying to save her son. Hamede Mansarolou is in front of a half-collapsed building. She says her son, 42-year-old Sadat, is trapped inside. When she couldn't reach him on the phone the morning of the earthquake,

she and her other son, Ayhan, ran over to his home there. They found him. Ayhan, who found him? They found him. He found him. Oh my God, how did you find him? His brother dug with his hands to find him. She says they found him trapped on what was the fourth floor of the building

that has pancaked in on itself, and he's still alive. I'm with Erin O'Brien, a freelance journalist here for The Economist, who helps me translate. Yesterday morning, she said, could you move your foot if you can hear me? And he moved it. Rescuers and volunteers tried to get him out, but didn't have the right equipment.

Now, more than 36 hours later, men have come with an excavator to try to free him. Chunks of concrete are being bashed away near where Sadat is, and his mother is clearly terrified. But all she can do is watch. Every time the bulldozer gets close to where her son is, she winces in pain, watching and begging them to go gently and go carefully.

But the reality is that to try to reach him, they have to remove this thick layer of concrete. But in doing that, they might well crush him. What are you doing? She shouts, hands to her head. They've stopped digging, they're going to go and climb into the space where they think he might be. It's incredibly dangerous because the whole building could collapse, even on top of the rescue workers. I'm telling everybody to be silent. Try to hear for signs of life at this point. They might have found him.

But if that's the case, it's not good news. They've turned away and they're walking back. Look like they're going to talk to the mother now. The mother's fallen to her knees, weeping, sobbing. So this story of Hamid-e Mansuroglu is just one among thousands. You know, that's the thing. Wherever we go, the moment you step outside, you meet people with these kind of tragic situations across southern Turkey and in Syria.

They're just all living the same nightmare. And you cross that border from Turkey into Syria, a border that is mostly shuttered because of the civil war. Tell us about that. That's right. So we went inside on Friday and we saw, you know, similar scenes of destruction to what we'd seen in Turkey. But the difference here is that there is no help. So we didn't hear any ambulances because there were hardly any. We didn't really see much of the heavy machinery that we'd seen in Turkey being used to try to excavate these destroyed buildings. In the town of Jinderis, on this one street with collapsed homes on either side, the mayor of the town, Mohamed Hafar, had this question. From the first day, where is the world? Why are you alone? Why are you alone?

If you come in the evening, you will see people are gathering in the streets and making fires in the streets. Five days from the catastrophe and making fires in the streets. Five days from the catastrophe and there is no tents, no help, no aid. He's saying they have 3,900 families that have nowhere to shelter. And we saw that ourselves. People were spending their nights, and I should say it's freezing here, sitting on the top of the debris of what was their home, and they have nowhere to go. Why isn't any help at all reaching them? Is it just because of the war? It's very complicated, and it involves politics, really. The thing is,

the Syrian regime says it's a violation of its sovereignty to bring aid across the border from Turkey because these areas are controlled by opposition rebels. And the United Nations has been able to send aid through one border crossing from Turkey. But the permission to do that comes up regularly at a vote at the UN Security Council. And after this earthquake, the roads from the UN distribution center to this one border crossing, Babelhauer, were damaged. And so even though there were other routes from Turkey into Syria where aid could have come, none did because they felt they couldn't use them. And there's, you know, hundreds of tons of aid that has poured into Turkey from all over the world. And you see that there, there's roads gridlocked with convoys carrying all sorts of materials. And when we crossed at one of the borders into Syria, it was completely empty. And I understood why, but it still felt very eerie. I should say some aid is now trickling

in. But the UN aid chief Martin Griffiths did say yesterday that by being so slow, the UN failed the people of northwest Syria. After you left Syria, you went back to Turkey to keep reporting from there and traveled to a region near the southern Turkish city of Islahiye. Tell us what you saw there. Yeah, we drove out into the countryside and we stopped at this small village. And given everything that we've been reporting this week it was quite strange you know the scenery was so beautiful and so idyllic Ari there were these green fields snow-capped mountains pomegranate trees and birdsong everywhere and that really contrasted so horribly with the situation of the Sonmez family who we met there they used to live in

these beautiful old stone homes but they're not safe to go into at the moment, so they were sleeping in tents outside. And they told me they lost 11 members of their family in this earthquake. Two others are still under the rubble of one collapsed building in a nearby town that once had 24 apartments in it and is now completely flattened. Those two relatives are 65-year-old Sakina Demir and her daughter, 35-year-old Samra.

And rescuers have been working on the building for days, but so far there's been no news of these two people. I asked the family if they think, you know, with so many buildings collapsed across the whole of Turkey, if everyone is going to be able to even recover the bodies of their loved ones to try to have some kind of closure madina sonmez sakina's sister and yasmin arslan her niece replied this we feel so bad so bad so bad so bad yasemin said i've never felt this before in my life. I can't feel anything. So I can't even think about that.

Our bodies are here, but we're gone, we're done. None of us are here. Because we're not, we can't feel it. It's too much to comprehend, really, isn't it? It's a nightmare. Lady with a thick red scarf, saying her pain is bigger than the world. We got into a car and went with them

to the nearby town of Islahia, where that destroyed building is. The rescuers had this 250 ton winch trying to pull the building apart and the family along with dozens of others were there watching on this ledge, this kind of grim, sad, terrible viewing deck. Lots of the relatives of the family that we met had been there for days. They were sleeping in cars, burning fires to try to keep warm. They hadn't changed their clothes in a week. And they, you know, it's really interesting. They still spoke about their loved ones in the present tense, these two people. But I think hope was fading. You know,

it's been a week now since the earthquake, and I think they know that the chances of them coming out alive a little, but nobody wants to admit that reality. I think partly because these people, they have to deal with the loss of their relatives, but also nobody knows how the economy will recover, what will happen in the country's politics. So as well as this great personal grief, they're living in this terrible, uncertain situation. You know, earthquakes this large would obviously have caused tremendous death under any circumstances, but there have also been questions over the last week about whether human decisions made this even worse. After this week reporting from the region,

as you look ahead, what do you see as the biggest challenges going forward? Well, like you said, you know, Ari, the quakes were huge. So it's always complicated to ascribe blame in these situations. But we are hearing examples of how part of the reasons that perhaps so many buildings collapsed was a question of governance. You know, in Turkey, we're hearing more and more about corruption in the permits for building during this country's ambitious growth period, trying to fuel the economy and construction companies kind of trying to get around the rules that were put in place to protect from earthquakes. So they've been finding ways to build buildings higher than they're allowed to. And in Syria, you know, it's the scene of war for more than a decade. And many people have been crying in the conflict. And the earthquakes, though, are just bigger than anyone could prepare for and cope with. One of the questions now is whether

the world even has the infrastructure to respond to something like this. Well, there's a war in Ukraine, you know, hunger in East Africa, and all these other unresolved crises that are stacking up. Ruth, thank you so much for your reporting. Thank you so much. Thanks for talking with me. That's NPR's Ruth Sherlock in Gaziantep, Turkey, one week after a massive earthquake devastated large parts of southern Turkey and northern Syria. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.