Focus turns to the homeless as quakes leave over 37,000 dead

KAHRAMANMARAS, Turkiye — Among the rubble, hundreds of thousands of homeless people face cold and hunger as authorities in Turkiye and Syria tackle the dire humanitarian disaster caused by the earthquakes that have left more than 37,000 dead.

As hopes of finding people alive under the debris fade more than a week after the two strong earthquakes and aftershocks, the focus has switched to providing food and shelter to the vast numbers of survivors.

About 1.2 million people have been housed in student residences, more than 206,000 tents have been erected and 400,000 victims have been evacuated from the devastated areas, the Turkish government said.

The disaster has also exacted a psychological toll. In a tent city near the quakes' epicenter in Kahramanmaras, Serkan Tatoglu, 41, a father of four, described how his family was haunted by their losses as they waited out the aftershocks.

"The youngest, traumatized by the aftershocks, keeps asking: 'Dad, are we going to die?'" Tatoglu said of his six-year-old.

Stories continued to emerge of people found alive in the rubble of collapsed buildings across the region, but experts warned that hopes of finding more survivors were fading.

In Adiyaman province, rescuers pulled 18-year-old Muhammed Cafer Cetin from the rubble of a building, the third rescue on Tuesday. Medics surrounded him to place a neck brace and he was on a stretcher with an oxygen mask, making it out to daylight on the 199th hour. "We are so happy," his uncle said.

Two others were rescued on Tuesday from one building destroyed in central Kahramanmaras about some 198 hours after the quake.

The economic cost of the disaster could be as much as $84.1 billion, with nearly $71 billion of that for housing, the Turkish employers' association Turkonfed said.

Neighboring Syria, already racked by 12 years of civil war, is of particular concern.

Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, subject to Western sanctions, called for international aid to help rebuild infrastructure in the country, where the UN estimates more than 5 million have been left homeless.

Zhang Jun, China's permanent representative to the UN, called for an immediate lifting of unilateral sanctions by the countries concerned to return the "hope of survival" to children in countries including Syria.

The unilateral sanctions have led to a severe shortage of heavy equipment and search and rescue tools in Syria, raising grave concerns that many children under the rubble may have perished as a result of slow rescue efforts or insufficient rescue capacity, Zhang told a Security Council meeting on children and armed conflict.

The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Assad had agreed to open two more border crossings from Turkiye to northwestern Syria to allow in aid.

A Saudi Arabian plane carrying aid to Syria landed in the city of Aleppo on Tuesday, the first in more than a decade of war.

The plane landed at Aleppo International Airport carrying 35 metric tons of food aid, the state news agency SANA reported.