Apocalyptic scenes following the earthquake that struck Syria and Turkey, shifting Anatolia by 5 metres: the UN fears 20,000 victims. Rescue workers continue to dig, with volunteers arriving from around the world.
Just over 24 hours after the Apocalypse, the number of victims — people struck, crushed, caught in their sleep by the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that hit Anatolia and Syria last night at 2.30am local time — has risen to at least 9,500, with the epicentre a few kilometres from the densely populated city of Gaziantep and that of Kahramanmaraş. Turkey counts approximately three thousand dead, according to the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (Afad), and 15,800 injured; in Syria the death toll stands at 1,451, according to figures provided by the Damascus government and rescue team sources.
But the toll appears only partial, because digging continues — with personnel and equipment arriving from all over the world, including from Italy, which has sent 50 Civil Protection workers — and will continue for another 72 hours, the time limit within which rescuers hope to find people still alive beneath the rubble: after 28 hours, in Gaziantep, a woman and three children were found alive. The toll also appears partial because, after the enormous initial tremor, further equally alarming shocks occurred in the hours that followed — one of magnitude 7.7 yesterday morning and one of 5.6 last night. According to the World Health Organization, the final death toll could ultimately reach twenty thousand. An apocalypse.
And this is precisely how survivors describe what they experienced first-hand. In the Guardian, for example, a Syrian from Idlib, Mohamand Kazmooz, recounts his escape with his family in the dark: "We saw a building collapse with all its residents — a building that had previously been bombed during the civil war by Russian and Syrian government forces." Temperatures in Syria and Anatolia are very low, yet tens of thousands of people have been displaced, and even those who could return home are afraid to do so, as the aftershock sequence has not yet subsided.
The losses from a historical and architectural standpoint are also enormous: the castle of Gaziantep, 2,200 years old, is no more; the historic city of Aleppo has been devastated once again. Skyscrapers, cathedrals — nothing withstood it: approximately 6,700 buildings have collapsed along a 150-kilometre fault in eastern Anatolia that has literally opened up, swallowing everything in its path and shifting the entire Anatolian plate by 5 metres, according to Ingv president Carlo Doglioni.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan described it as "the most severe earthquake since 1939", referring to the Erzincan earthquake, which killed approximately 33,000 people, but experts draw even more dramatic comparisons: one hundred times the power of the Amatrice earthquake, thirteen times the power of an atomic bomb, and so on. Turkey has accepted offers of assistance and expressions of solidarity from 45 countries and supranational bodies, and amid the rubble, alongside 16,000 Turkish volunteers, historical enemies are digging side by side: Biden's United States and Putin's Russia, Turks, Kurds and Syrians (this is the area of the so-called Turkish Kurdistan, where large numbers of displaced people are already the norm). Even Volodymyr Zelensky's Ukraine offered its help, sending a civil engineering team. For one day, the tragedy of war fades into the background, eclipsed by the tragedy of the earth.
