The earthquake death toll has risen so has criticism of Turkey’s government response

AFAD, Turkey’s Emergency Shelter for Syria, the Most Displaced Population Since the Feb. 6 Earthquake, has Set Up 70,000 Tents

KAHRAMANMARAS, Turkey — Rescuers have pulled more survivors from the debris of the Feb. 6 earthquake that devastated parts of Turkey and Syria even as the window for finding people alive shrank.

Many women and children died in the northwestern region of Syria. The total dead in Syria was 3,553, while in Turkey, officials counted 21,043 dead through Saturday.

In a visit to the city of Kahramanmaras, Turkey’s President said that he was facing a great disaster. There were shortfalls by the government in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, but Erodgan said no one would be left in the streets. Hatay is the worst-hit province and will be visited by Erdogan on Wednesday.

Hamideh Mansulolu was waiting to hear whether her son survived when she stood outside of the building that used to be their home.

In the rebel held areas of northern Syria, people were already suffering from poverty and an outbreak of diseases when the earthquake hit. Now many are fending for themselves.

The situation in Syria is very different from Turkey, where 70 countries and 14 international organizations immediately offered teams of rescuers and aid.

Turkey’s emergency management agency, AFAD, reports it has set up more than 70,000 tents for emergency shelter to the more than 380,000 people who have been temporarily displaced by this disaster.

Aftershocks, floods and hypothermia: the impact of an earthquake in Syria on pedestrian and habitation in the country’s southern regions

People need to be prepared for more earthquakes and aftershocks, as well as worsening weather. Ilan Kelman, who studies disasters and health at University College London, said the possibility of major aftershocks causing more damage would continue for weeks and months.

There are two major faults in Turkey that sits on the Anatolian plate. The southern rim of Eurasia is being squeezed out towards the west by the northward movement of the plate that carries Syria, says David Rothery, a scientist at the Open University. He says Turkey is moving west by 2 centimetres per year. “Half the length of this fault is lit up now with earthquakes.”

One of the most powerful earthquakes to hit the region in a century rocked residents from their slumber in the early hours of Monday morning around 4 a.m. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) said that the 7.8 magnitude earthquake was in Turkey’s Gaziantep province.

More than 5,700 buildings in Turkey have collapsed, according to the country’s disaster agency, and questions have been asked about the integrity of structures in some areas of the affected regions.

In Syria, there have been more than 11 years of conflict and it’s hard to enforce building standards. The earthquake struck Syria’s northwestern regions, with buildings collapsing in Aleppo and Idlib. Some war-damaged buildings in Syria have been rebuilt using low-quality materials. “They might have fallen down more readily than things that were built at somewhat greater expense. He says they have yet to find out.

With scattered showers and snow in the region set to continue, the elements are putting the lives of those trapped underneath the rubble – who have already gone days without food and water – at risk of hypothermia. Residents are being asked to leave buildings for their own safety as officials worry about more earthquakes.

Born in Turkey, three years after the First World War, a Syrian girl’s body was found in a tent camp across the border with Turkey

They arrived in the back of a van, wrapped in body bags, blue tarps or colorful family blankets. They had their names written on pieces of paper for family members waiting in the cold to receive them on the Syrian side of the border with Turkey.

After getting word from relatives in Turkey that there was a body being returned to Syria, people from across northwestern Syria went to Bab al-Hawa. They had to collect the dead in the S.U.V. and take them to their final resting place.

The body of the girl was found in the ruins of their home in Turkey. Both of her parents and a brother were still under the rubble.

“Those who died, we want them to come back,” said Mr. al-Yousef, who lives in a tent camp near the Syrian town of Sarmada on the border. “We want them to be buried among their family.”

When shelling and airstrikes intensified in Syria, his cousin and his family moved to another part of the country closer to the border with Turkey. Soon after, they crossed over to Turkey because Yara’s father could not find work in Syria.

Over 12 years of a civil war that has still not ended, nearly four million Syrians fled to the relative safety of neighboring Turkey. Millions more sought refuge in Jordan, Lebanon and Europe.

The Bab al-Hawa crossing is the only one approved by the United Nations for transporting international aid into opposition-held areas of northwestern Syria, where there was an overwhelming humanitarian need even before the earthquake struck. Other aid groups use it as well.

On Wednesday morning, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Damascus said that roads to the border crossing were open and that the first aid convoy to Syria from Turkey was expected to arrive in the coming hours.

The United Nations Cross-Border Aid Mission in Idlib, Syria During the Second World Reaction After the Sept. 11 September Severe Earthquake

Muslim funeral prayers were being held constantly across northwestern Syria, sometimes in the shadow of mounds of rubble as rescue workers continued a desperate search and recovery operation.

When the van pulled up, the men surged forward, running, and crowded around the back of the vehicle. A border worker began calling out the names of the dead.

For nearly two hours Mr. al-Yousef and his aunt waited at the crossing, experiencing a wave of disappointment each time new bodies arrived and their young relative was not among them.

Mr. al-Yousef and his aunt drove home, through villages and towns where other people’s family members were still lying under the rubble waiting to be rescued or recovered.

They were told that Yara’s body would not arrive in Syria until after the bodies of her parents and brother were recovered.

The situation for the people in Syria affected by the disaster has worsened as fresh snow has fallen.

The UN cross-border aid operation has begun again. We are happy that we were able to reach the people in northwest Syria. Sanjana Quazi said that they hoped that the operation would continue as it is a humanitarian lifeline.

The only access point between the two countries was shut down for three days because there were not enough bodies to receive aid.

Immediately after the quake, the United Nations said roads to the crossing were blocked, but as of Wednesday they were clear, raising questions as to why it was taking so long for help to arrive.

Aid groups such as the UN are planning to begin moving aid for northern Syria on Thursday. Alloush said he’s been told to expect six aid trucks by midday, carrying sanitary items and “possibly food.”

A former merchant named Abu Muhammad Sakhour is a nurse who is currently volunteering in the rebel-held town of Idlib, dressing wounds for earthquake victims and checking on injured people who have been discharged from crowded hospitals.

Muhammad Munther Atqi, a doctor from the Independent Doctor’s Association, is living in Gaziantep, Turkey, but is in close contact with his colleagues in Syria. He said hospitals there have been overwhelmed with bodies, and staff are waiting for families to come and identify them, so they can be taken away.

But survivors are facing their own challenges each day as water supplies dwindle and disease threatens to spread. The residents of Syria are having a hard time finding food due to bakeries collapsing in the earthquake.

The world knows of these rescues because of Karam Kellieh, a resident and photojournalist who lives in the opposition-controlled territory. The area is home to some 4 million people displaced by the decade-long Syrian civil war. Bombs and poverty devastated the area before the earthquake. Politics and the Syrian government were obstacles to aid.

We don’t need the politics. We don’t need the game playing that’s going on. Barnes said the international community should focus on the border crossing remaining open. “Because now, we are past the first phase of finding people, and we are heading into the humanitarian phase. We need to provide people with basic shelter, food, and water.”

The number of people needing humanitarian assistance had stood at 15.3 million, but that number will need to be revised due to the recent earthquake, El- Mostafa Benlamlih said.

An aid worker distributing supplies across cities in northern Syria told CNN on Thursday that homeless people have been sleeping in their cars amid a “very, very difficult,” situation.

Syria’s government believes it needs more and wants the sanctions on the country to be lifted. A number of Western countries have imposed bans on trade with Syria, including weapons, equipment, petrochemicals and luxury goods.

“The US has been involved in the Syrian crisis for a long time,” Mao Ning, spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Wednesday. The Syrian people are unable to get basic livelihood security due to the frequent military interventions and harsh economic sanctions.

He is using the disaster as a way to have sanctions removed, said the executive director of Deir el-Zour 24, a research organization that delivers news from Syria. “If we want to bring aid to Syria, we can. Time is critical. We are playing with life and death.

“It would be quite ironic, if not even counterproductive, for us to reach out to a government that has brutalized its people over the course of a dozen years now,” US State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters Monday.

humanitarian partners are on the ground and can provide assistance in the aftermath of disasters. The regime has never shown any inclination to put the welfare, the wellbeing, the interests of its people first.

Millions were already suffering from the effects of extreme poverty when the earthquake hit, so the UN is the only aid group that is still in rebel-held areas.

Syrians don’t know where their next meal will come from. When we say meal, it’s not about vegetables, not about meat… it’s about simple bread,” said Moutaz Adham, Oxfam’s country director for Syria.

More than 5,700 buildings have collapsed in Turkey since September 8, 2005, and a boy from that collapsed building is among Syrians waiting for international aid

Rescue efforts continue in both countries, but authorities have been overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the disaster. More than 5,700 buildings in Turkey have collapsed, according to the country’s disaster agency.

Initial trading showed rapid declines that caused the stock exchange in Istanbul to shut down. Inflation in Turkey was out-of-control.

Arabic for God is Great is chanted by the crowd. Civil defense groups and volunteers are helping to rescue a boy from a collapsed building in northwestern Syria.

Kellieh could be reached by phone on Wednesday. He spoke from Jinderes, a part of Syria’s Aleppo province that’s under opposition control. He said many buildings there have collapsed. People are in the streets in the freezing cold, waiting for aid to arrive. Buildings are still unlivable afterShocks have damaged buildings.

“Humanitarian aid and international aid haven’t appeared 72 hours after the catastrophic earthquake,” he said, describing the little help that is trickling into the region as a haphazard grassroots effort by individual groups.

Civil defense groups and civilians are trying to assist in the rescue efforts. “Everyone’s waiting for international rescue and aid just to be able to process what’s happened, this catastrophe.”

Rescue efforts continue as untold others remain trapped under the rubble. Stories of miraculous rescues, like that of a baby girl born under the rubble, are a bullhorn for what’s at stake.

People are digging with their own hands in many areas, but the situation is particularly dire in northwestern Syria, where there is little heavy machinery to lift rubble. Power outages have resulted in fuel shortages in hospitals.

“What the government is doing to help the earthquake victims of Turkey’s crisis,” a commentator on Ozel, Erdogan’s predecessor, and the role of his coalition government

But critics like Ozel point out that national funds meant for natural disasters like this one were instead spent on highway construction projects managed by associates of Erdogan and his coalition government.

After a catastrophic earthquake in northwestern Turkey killed more than 18,000 people in 1999, authorities imposed an earthquake tax meant to corral billions of dollars’ worth of disaster prevention and relief.

A lot of restrictions on individual cities and aid organizations have been put in place by the centralization of Turkey’s government. Turkey’s embassies, along with an array of nongovernmental organizations and cultural associations, are collecting donations internationally.

With an election expected by June, Ozel says Erdogan has already been weakened by out-of-control inflation in Turkey. “I think the government is going to be one of the people killed by the earthquake,” Ozel says.

An 18-year-old high school student, Emrihan Korkmaz, has been working on the aid effort for three days. Schools throughout Turkey have been ordered closed to mourn victims of the earthquake and so that people like Korkmaz can help out.

“We loaded 18 semi trucks and sent them to the earthquake zone.” They’re filled with blankets, clothes, but there is a more urgent need for food,” he says, as he loads a box underneath a banner with the image of Erdogan hanging from the ceiling. “However we can get it to them, it doesn’t matter. People there need food.”

Somezley says the government has done what they can to help the victims. This is not a time to talk about politics, it is a time to help people who need it.

The aftermath of the Istanbul earthquake: How well do buildings in the Middle East? CNN’s Aharonov-Korel Erdik told CNN

A series of aftershocks reverberated through the region in the immediate hours after the initial incident. A magnitude 6.7 aftershock followed 11 minutes after the first quake hit, but the largest temblor, which measured 7.5 in magnitude, struck about nine hours later. More than 125 aftershocks have been recorded so far.

Rescue and recovery efforts on both sides of the border have been made more difficult by poor conditions due to the cold and wet weather system moving through the region.

Erdik told CNN the images of widespread destruction and debris indicates “that there are highly variable qualities of designs and construction.” He says the type of structural failures following an earthquake are usually partial collapses. The actual design and code are both used to avoid total collapses.

But not all buildings have been built according to the modern Turkish seismic standard, Jaiswal said. Deficiencies in the design and construction, especially in older buildings, mean that many buildings could not withstand the severity of the shocks.

A number of the buildings that have collapsed are likely pre-1999, according to Erdik. He added there also would have been instances where some buildings didn’t conform to code.

The codes are very modern in Turkey and similar to the US codes, but there is one issue that we have tried to tackle with legal and administrative procedures. he explained. We have permits from the municipalities and some controls for construction. But then again, there are things that are lacking.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/07/middleeast/earthquake-turkey-syria-why-deadly-intl/index.html

The Epicenter of Earthquake Turkey Syria: Why are We Deadly Intl and We Still Live Below the Erdospheric Line?

The community, the citizens are the first line of defense, he told CNN Wednesday. “They dug up family, friends, neighbors.”

He stated that time is the enemy in Turkey and Syria. People die due to immediate medical needs such as bleeding to death or succumbing to crush injuries; due to aftershocks that collapse precarious structures with people underneath; and due to the weather which has dropped below freezing at night and which has been cold during the day, so people die through hypothermia. They die from lack of food and water.

The USGS describes an earthquake as “the ground shaking caused by a sudden slip on a fault. The fault is being pushed together by the stresses in the earth. When the rocks slip suddenly, the energy from waves that hit the earth’s crust causes the shakes we feel during an earthquake.

The Richter Scale, which scientists used for many years, is not as accurate as the MMI, which is a more accurate measure of a quake.

The power of an earthquake is known as magnitude. The depth of the earthquake and geography of the area can affect the intensity of the shaking. On the magnitude scale, each increase of one whole number translates to 32 times more energy.

It is the strongest quake to hit anywhere in the world since an 8.1 magnitude earthquake struck a region near the South Sandwich Islands in the southern Atlantic Ocean in 2021, though the remote location of that incident resulted in little damage.

CNN’s meteorologist and severe weather expert Chad Myers said, “we always talk about the epicenter, but in this case we should talk about the epi-line.”

This is unlike the Ring of Fire, which runs along the west coast of the United States. Subduction, which happens when one plate slides below another, can cause earthquakes in this zone.

Plates move instead of not moving vertically in a strike slip. The buildings don’t want to go back and forth. And then the secondary waves begin to go back and forth as well,” Myers added.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/07/middleeast/earthquake-turkey-syria-why-deadly-intl/index.html

The aftermath of the 2004 Sumatra earthquake killed two people: Mohammed Juma, Ibrahim Zakariya, and his wife Abdulhadi, 22, were pulled from the rubble

More than 200,000 people died or were listed as missing and presumed dead when a 9.1 magnitude earthquake hit the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia in 2004.

That incident left widespread destruction in its wake after walls of water engulfed entire towns, dragged houses onto highways and caused the country’s worst nuclear disaster on record.

Many people in the large area don’t have a place to stay because of the freezing temperatures. The Turkish government has distributed millions of hot meals as well as tents and blankets, but is still struggling to reach many people in need.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad criticized Western countries in his first televised comments since the 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck parts of the country five days ago, Syrian state media showed.

Syrian state TV said Assad and his wife Asma on Saturday morning visited Duha Nurallah, 60, and her son Ibrahim Zakariya, 22, who were pulled out of rubble the night before in the nearby coastal town of Jableh.

JINDERIS, Syria — Mohammed Juma sleeps on the heap of rubble that crushed his family as he survived. The 20-year-old in this town still doesn’t understand what happened and does not have a clue as to what happened, but he does know that when the temperatures plummet, he and others burn possessions found in the debris for heat.

The people of the town of Jinderis were not able to save their trapped friends because of the lack of machinery and equipment.

After the home collapsed on them, Mohammed Juma said that his wife and two children were still alive. Juma and his neighbors pulled at the shattered concrete for hours until their hands bled, but the effort was futile.

Now the Syrian civil defense teams are using the few excavators they do have to recover the dead. On Friday morning in Jinderis, at least 850 bodies had been pulled from the rubble. Zakaria Tabakh, 26, remembers cuddling his son, 2-year-old Abdulhadi, to sleep and laying him in his bed, where he was killed by the falling debris. Tabakh’s wife passed away in his bed. Few friends were able to come because they were too focused on burying their own loved ones.

After years of war, they’ve been left with nothing. Thousands of people live in the olive groves because there is no basic access to services in the tents set up in the groves.

The town of Sawran is less than one hour away from a border crossing. The Turki family had nine people, five of them children, die in their home on the side of the main street. Across the road a family of seven were killed. They fled their home in KhanSheikhoun, where the Syrian government attacked the population with a nerve agent, killing 89 people.

The Narli family were saved in central Kahramanmaras 133 hours after Monday’s 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck. First, 12 year old Nehir Narli was saved by her parents.

That followed the rescue earlier in the day of a family of five from a mound of debris in the hard-hit town of Nurdagi, in Gaziantep province, TV network HaberTurk reported. The rescuers chanted, “God is great!” as the last family member, the father, was lifted to safety.

Hurriyet and Iskenderun Report: “God is good!” cried a girl trapped in the debris of a collapsed building

“In parts of the settlements close to the fault line, almost no stone was left standing,” he said.

In the 134th hour of the earthquake, a woman in her 20s was extricated from the rubble in Elbistan, following the rescue of another person in the same hour. Ahead of her rescue, police stated that people should not cheer or clap in order to prevent other rescue efforts from interfering. She was covered in a thermal blanket on a stretcher. Rescuers were hugging. Some shouted “God is great!”

Just an hour earlier, a 3-year-old girl and her father were pulled from debris in the town of Islahiye, also in Gaziantep province, and soon after a 7-year-old girl was rescued in the province of Hatay.

The rescues brought shimmers of joy amid overwhelming devastation days after Monday’s 7.8-magnitude quake and a powerful aftershock hours later caused thousands of buildings to collapse, killing more than 25,000, injuring another 80,000 and leaving millions homeless.

Not everything ended well. Rescuers reached a 13-year-old girl inside the debris of a collapsed building in Hatay province early Saturday and intubated her. But she died before the medical teams could amputate a limb and free her from the rubble, Hurriyet newspaper reported.

As aid continued to arrive, a group from the Indian Army’s medical assistance team started treating the injured in a field hospital in the southern city of Iskenderun, which had a main hospital demolished.

He said he had been rescued from his collapsed apartment building in the city of Antakya after an earthquake struck on Monday. He was released without proper treatment for his injuries after he received basic first aid.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/11/1156313344/turkey-syria-earthquake-death-toll-survivors

The World Health Organization Arrives in Turkey to Attend a Mass Massacre in the Dead City, Antakya, according to a Source in Turkey

″I buried (everyone that I lost), then I came here,” Canbulat said: “My daughter is dead, my sibling is dead, my aunt is dead, and the wife of my son is pregnant.”

A large makeshift graveyard was under construction on the outskirts of Antakya on Saturday. Backhoes and bulldozers dug pits in the field on the northeastern edge of the city as trucks and ambulances loaded with black body bags arrived continuously. Soldiers directing traffic on the busy adjacent road warned motorists not to take photographs.

A worker with Turkey’s Religious Affairs who did not want to talk to the media said that around 800 bodies were brought to the cemetery on Friday, the first day it was open. As many as 2,000 people were buried by midday on Saturday, according to him.

If people survive, it’s a miracle. Most of the people that come out now are dead, and they come here,” he said.

The head of the World Health Organization arrived in Syria on Saturday with 35 tons of equipment, according to state news agency SANA. He said another plane carrying an additional 30 tons of medical equipment will arrive in the coming days.

A Turkish earthquakeman fathered daughter photographed under the rubble in Kahramanmaras: “Irmak didn’t survive”

He was photographed holding the hand of his 15-year-old daughter, Irmak, under the rubble in the southern Turkish city of Kahramanmaras, near the epicenter of the quake. He said she died at the moment it hit, with no chance of escape.

It was terrible. I rushed there after I heard the news. With great effort I tried to pull out my daughter. However, unfortunately, I couldn’t save my daughter,” Hancer said.

“I didn’t have hope because there was a large girder on my daughter. He said that she was crushed, even though her waist was free. “Unfortunately, during the earthquake, she died right there and then. She didn’t have a chance of survival.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/13/middleeast/turkey-quake-man-daughter-hand-photo-intl/index.html

Emergency Management in Turkey: AFAD and the rebuilding of the house under the rubble in the aftermath of the September 11 Earthquake

“I also talked with AFAD They aided as many as they could in the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency. He said that they could not provide an excavator to that area.

“My mother, my two older brothers, my sister-in-law and her little daughter. My daughter and seven others were present. Hancer said they were all under the rubble.

Hancer’s home has also been badly damaged, he said, adding that he doesn’t have anywhere to stay. “We cannot enter our house because we don’t have the means. We are left outside.”

Meanwhile, amid growing public anger over the government’s response to the disaster, Turkish authorities have carried out a wave of arrests of property developers accused of “negligence” over building collapses due to last week’s earthquake.

Raed Al Saleh: The United Nations in Syria for the Protection of Human Lives and Strengthening Communities During Earthquake

Editor’s Note: Raed Al Saleh is head of The White Helmets, a group of nearly 3,000 volunteers working to save lives and strengthen communities in Syria. His views are expressed in this commentary. You can read the opinion on CNN.

The UN Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief has hailed the search and rescue efforts after the earthquake as unprecedented in history, but we were left with only limited equipment and manpower. During the most important moments of rescue operations, the United Nations did not give us a single word of help or support, even now that we have regained our operational capacity.

We are the only organization here that has the training and equipment to go out into the field. The volunteers have been doing something that no one else has done.

The cynical move that Assad has made is too late. UN insistence on waiting for the permission of the Syrian regime is unforgivable, the same regime that has bombed, gassed, starved, forcibly deported and imprisoned millions of Syrians. The Syrians are not a credible partner in addressing the suffering of their citizens in a neutral and impartial manner.

The UN asked the Security Council to authorize aid access through two more border crossings, which was a misguided approach that wasted time. Legal analysts and scholars have argued that the need for aid is too high to be politicized.

The United Nations needs to do better. Something is clearly broken if the very system that was set up to protect and save human lives during an emergency leaves children to die under the rubble as precious minutes and hours pass.

Time and again Russia has used its veto at the Security Council to shut border crossings, reducing the routes for delivery of cross-border aid via Turkey to a single entry. More cross-border routes were already desperately needed, and opening more crossing on a temporary basis isn’t enough.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/13/opinions/white-helmets-syria-united-nations-earthquake-al-saleh/index.html

The survivors of the earthquake in Hatay: A search for humanitarian aid after the collapse of a building near the human capital, KHramanmaras

As we searched through the rubble of thousands of buildings, it was the local affected communities that helped us most: lending their cars and heavy vehicles to the response, helping to dig, and donating fuel they could have used to keep themselves warm.

There is no more time to waste. The leadership and vision of the UN secretary-general are needed to put himself on the right side of history. Humanitarian aid access should not be restricted by the Security Council and regime in the future. The United Nations and international aid agencies have to have unimpeded access to humanitarian assistance in order to keep more lives alive.

There is a survivor in the rubble of a building that collapsed after an earthquake in Hatay province.

Hakan Yasinoğlu, 45, spent 278 hours beneath the rubble, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency. He was being carried to an ambulance on a stretcher.

Neslihan Kilic, a mother of two children, was trapped for 258 hours in a building that collapsed in Kahramanmaras.

U.N. humanitarian aid to Syria in the aftermath of the 2009 Earthquake: Syrian refugee’s status and consequences for agricultural and food security

A spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says trucks are carrying items from six UN agencies. They crossed through the border gates of Bab al-Hawa and Bab al-Salam, he said.

Meanwhile, The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO, said it was working closely with Turkey to determine the steps needed to rehabilitate infrastructure in the agricultural sector damaged by the quake, including irrigation systems, roads, markets and storage capacity.

In Syria, the earthquakes appear to have caused significant disruption to crop and livestock production capacities, threatening immediate and longer-term food security, according to the Rome-based agency.

The decision allows holders of temporary protection cards who live in damaged areas to cross into Syria without a permit from Turkish authorities. Normally, Turkey would consider Syrians holding protected status who crossed into Syria without a permit to have relinquished their status as asylum-seekers. They would have to give up their protection cards and be banned from returning to Turkey for five years.

Spain says it will take in some 100 Syrian refugees in Turkey that have suffered in the earthquake. Migration Minister José Luis Escrivá said the refugees would be those considered most vulnerable and badly affected by the quake.

Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay said the state cared for 1,589 children who were separated from their families in the earthquake.