The United Nations has warned that at least 870,000 people across Turkey and Syria are in urgent need of hot food. In Syria alone, 5.3 million people may be homeless.
Kahramanmaras: According to the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), rescuers pulled children from the rubble of the Turkey-Syria earthquake on Friday (local time). The death toll has now crossed 24,000. Meanwhile, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said authorities should have acted faster after the earthquake. Erdogan visited Turkey’s Adyaman province on Friday. There he admitted that the government’s response was not as swift as it could have been. Erdogan said, “We have the largest relief and rescue team in the world right now, but it is a reality that the relief and rescue operations are not as fast as we would like.”
Voting is going to
be held on May 14 Erdogan is standing for re-election in the voting to be held on May 14. His opponent has made an issue of laxity in relief and rescue work after the earthquake to attack him. Now the election can be postponed due to the disaster. There is anger among the people due to the delay in aid delivery and rescue and it is likely to become an election issue. For Erdogan, even before the earthquake, the return to power was the most difficult challenge. He called for solidarity with the Turkish people and described his criticism as a “negative campaign for political expediency”. The head of Turkey’s main opposition party, Kemal Kilikdaroglu, criticized the government, saying, “The earthquake was huge, but the lack of coordination, lack of planning and incompetence was bigger than the earthquake.”
In Syria, 5.3 million people may be homeless
According to the SMH report, hundreds of thousands of people have been left homeless due to poor winter conditions and food shortages. The leaders of both the countries have faced questions on the relief and rescue work after the earthquake. Rescue workers, including teams from dozens of countries, are working day and night to find people buried under the rubble. They are trying to hear any sounds of life from the mound of rubble. The United Nations has warned that at least 870,000 people across Turkey and Syria are in urgent need of hot food. In Syria alone, 5.3 million people may be homeless.
“It’s a huge number, already suffering massive displacement,” said Shivanka Dhanapala, Syria representative of the UN High Commissioner for Bashar al-Assad refugees, who visited the quake-hit areas for the first time . State media reported that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made his first visit to the affected areas since the earthquake. Bashar visited a hospital in Aleppo with his wife, Asma. His government also approved the distribution of humanitarian aid for the first time in the country’s 12-year civil war. This is a step that can help lakhs of desperate people. The World Food Program had earlier said that its stock of relief supplies was running out in rebel-held northwest Syria, SMH reported.
