Ankara/Osmaniye (Turkey)/Beirut, (EFE) In addition, there are more than 42,000 injured and many of the basic services in the region have been destroyed.
In Turkey, where the magnitude 7.7 and 7.6 tremors had their epicenter, the latest official tally puts the number of injured at more than 38,200. The aid teams have managed to rescue some 8,000 people alive from the almost 6,000 destroyed buildings.
The relief teams are trying to speed up the work to save those who remain under the rubble with freezing temperatures of up to -6 degrees and with basic infrastructure badly damaged.
In the last few hours there have been several rescues of people who had been buried under rubble for more than 50 hours while specialized teams dig in an increasingly desperate search.
In numerous affected areas in Turkey, residents criticize that no help has arrived, families cannot return to their homes even when they are still standing for fear of landslides and services such as water, electricity and heating have stopped working in in the middle of the winter.
Although dozens of countries have promised help to Turkey and many teams are already on the ground, the challenge is to rescue those trapped under the rubble as soon as possible because the cold reduces their chances of survival.
More than 2,000 deaths in Syria alone
In Syria, immersed in a civil war for twelve years, the information on victims comes, on the one hand, from the Government of Bachar al Asad and, on the other, from the last enclave of the country controlled by the opposition.
The latest tally puts 2,092 people dead and another 4,000 injured, while hundreds of people remain trapped in the rubble.
The areas of the northwestern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, in the hands of the opposition and bordering Turkey, concentrate the highest number of victims, with 1,280 dead and more than 2,600 injured, according to the White Helmets rescue group.
Rescue workers have warned that “hundreds of families” are still trapped under the remains of collapsed buildings, so the balance is expected to continue to increase.
For its part, the official Syrian news agency SANA yesterday placed the latest number of deaths at 812 and the number of injuries at 1,449 for the areas under the control of the Government of Bashar al-Assad, which has not updated its balance sheet in 24 hours.
Seven days to rescue survivors
According to a representative of the UN Humanitarian Aid Office, the first to act in cases of disaster, there is only a seven-day window to rescue people who have been buried under the rubble.
This estimate is the result of innumerable rescue operations around the world, although there may always be exceptions and the victims may endure a little more time, as commented by the spokesperson for that entity, Jens Laerke, when making a first assessment of the cost. human of tragedy
To rescue the victims, the UN has mobilized two separate disaster assessment teams, as well as search and rescue teams, made up of the best specialists in the world in these tasks, who are traveling to Turkey.
“The big challenge right now is access by land (for these personnel and their equipment) as many roads in the region have been destroyed by earthquakes,” Laerke said.
Another difficulty is the lack of vehicles to transport the international experts, for which the local authorities are mobilizing trucks from other provinces of Turkey.