The tremors left at least 7,000 people dead in Turkey, according to a provisional assessment. Along the Syrian border, the stories of inhabitants reveal considerable damage.
by Nicolas Bourcier (provinces of Hatay and Gaziantp, Special Envoy)
Difficult to imagine more striking contrast. On the one hand, the discreet charm of nature, its wet and shimmering lands flanked by high mountains harshly sliced under a sky again bright. On the other hand, houses flattened like leaves, twisted or torn along a ravine or on the side of the road with incredible violence. Driving the country roads in the region struck by the magnitude 7.8 earthquake, Monday, February 6, in the early morning, between Hatay and Gaziantep, along the Syrian border, is to invite itself to deep Turkey, that Little people, farmers, workers and merchants in shock. All these villages and small towns whose daily life has been brutally upset in the space of a few moments and which, for many, feel forgotten.
According to a provisional assessment established on Wednesday morning, the earthquake would have killed nearly 7,000 people in Turkey (and more than 2,500 people in Syria). On Tuesday, when international aid was starting to deploy, a national mourning of seven days was decreed by the Turkish authorities. Several stories of crossed inhabitants along the ways and paths, in these remote areas or on the edge of urban centers, reveal considerable damage in rural areas, with a large number of municipalities which would have lost dozens, even hundreds, of residents.
a Kiran Yurdu, it is the whole population that helps and attends the excavation activities, which seem to have never stopped since the first day. Two shovels are hard at work on both sides of this small traditional village, located on a hillside between the sea and the Syrian neighbors. One of them belongs to a villager, the other to the town hall. “It may be our only advantage over cities, we have the tools on site,” says Ahmet, in his forties, her face marked by fatigue. Child of the village, he says he is the correspondent for Anatolian Press, an old public information network with an impressive network and still today supplier of the electoral databases. According to him, the village lists for the moment more than twenty people dead. “But the figures will quickly climb, the damage is considerable, the roofs collapsed in a snap of the fingers.”
Mutual
At the entrance to Kiran Yurdu, a body has just been out of the rubble from a long and wide collapsed house, sprayed all along, in heaps of concrete and steel stems. This one is wrapped in a blanket before being laid on the ground in front of a wall still standing. At the foot of the crane, they are a dozen of all ages to form a semicircle, carefully scrutinizing each stroke of the mechanical shovel. The other machine, that of the town hall, activates with a family building, where, the day before, a woman could be saved. They would still be three under the rubble.
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