As rescue efforts enter their 10th day after the massive earthquakes in southeast Turkey and northern Syria on 6 February, the combined death toll has risen to 41,218.
Here are the latest updates in the aftermath of the disaster that struck Turkey and Syria.
Turkey
According to the statement of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on 14 February, the number of people who are now known to have lost their lives in Turkey is 35,418, and the number of those injured is 105,505. Over 8,000 people have been rescued from the rubble.
The death toll in Turkey now exceeds that of the Erzincan earthquake of 1939, which killed around 33,000 people, making it the deadliest disaster in the country’s modern history.
Although there has been a dramatic reduction in the numbers of people pulled from the rubble alive, efforts to find survivors continue. Nine survivors were pulled from the collapsed buildings on Tuesday.
The treatment of 792 injured unaccompanied children, of 1362 who survived the earthquake is ongoing, Family and Social Services Minister Derya Yanık said. The identities of 291 children have not yet been confirmed.
More than two million earthquake survivors have left the region since the earthquakes, that affected approximately 13.5 million people in ten provinces.
Around 1.6 million earthquake survivors have been given accommodation in 890,000 public facilities and 50,000 hotels. For those who remain in the region, where there are prevailing severe winter conditions, the problem of shelter continues.
Of the 236,410 buildings that the Environment and Urbanisation Ministry has examined so far, 153,506 independent units in 33,143 buildings have been severely damaged or destroyed and 6,849 have been moderately damaged.
Syria
The death toll has risen to 5,800 in war-torn Syria where about nine million people have been affected by devastating earthquakes, according to the United Nations.
The major disaster affected 2.5 million children in Syria and many thousands of children died in the disaster, according to the UN children’s agency UNICEF. Over 800,000 displaced Syrian children also live in the affected provinces in Turkey.
Spokesman for UNICEF James Elder noted that Syrian children under 12 had been born into a world of conflict, and some of them had already been displaced several times.
“This would appear [to be] the international community’s last chance to show solidarity to these millions of children,” said Elder.
After long opposition from Damascus to cross-border aid deliveries to the rebel-held regions, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad agreed on Monday to temporarily allow earthquake aid to flow through two new border crossings from Turkey into areas of northern Syria under the control of opposition groups.
The first UN aid convoy entered rebel-controlled northwest Syria from Turkey through the newly opened Bab al-Salam gate on Tuesday. The same day, Saudi Arabia sent its first reported aid to Assad-controlled Aleppo. Until then, the country had only delivered earthquake assistance to rebel-controlled areas.
Meanwhile, an aid convoy of 50 lorries from the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) entered areas of Syria controlled by Turkish-backed opposition.
AANES recently announced that earthquake victims have been afraid to receive supplies sent by them, as rebel forces had been blocking humanitarian aid sent from the northeast.
