Turkey Earthquake: Earthquake’s Death Toll Jumps to Over 4,300 in Turkey and Syria (Published 2023) (2024)

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Here’s what you need to know about the earthquake.

The initial earthquake, centered near Gaziantep in south central Turkey, was as strong as a quake that hit in 1939, the most powerful ever recorded in Turkey.

Here are key developments:

• In Turkey, at least 2,921 people were killed, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency, in addition to at least 13,293 injured, and more than 5,600 buildings were destroyed, the government said. “We do not know where the number of dead and injured can go,” said President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A woman was rescued after 22 hours, Anadolu reported, as the window to find people alive in the rubble was closing.

• In Syria, rescue workers used headlamps and flood lights to work throughout the night. More than 1,450 people were dead, according to the state health ministry and the White Helmets relief group, and thousands more were injured across the country. Many Syrian war refugees are also in the quake-stricken area of Turkey. The country has taken in 3.6 million Syrian refugees, more than any other country, according to the U.N. refugee agency, which runs one of its largest operations from Gaziantep.

• Videos shared on social media from Turkey and across the border in Syria showed destroyed buildings and rescue crews searching through piles of rubble for survivors. Some people fled their homes in the rain and took shelter in cars.

• Governments around the world quickly responded to Turkey’s request for international assistance, deploying rescue teams and offers of aid.

• Earthquakes occur frequently in Turkey, which sits on fault lines. Recent quakes in the region have caused deadly landslides.

Vivek Shankar, Natasha Frost, John Yoon and Yonette Joseph contributed reporting.

The collapse of countless buildings raises hard questions about Turkey’s construction standards.

After analyzing pictures of the buildings destroyed in Turkey on Monday, Matthys Levy, a New York-based structural engineer, and co-author of the book “Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail,” said the concrete block structures were not built with the ability to sway without failing, and probably did not have enough steel reinforcing the concrete.

“They have no seismic defenses at all because they’re all rigid.” he said. “So, you get a shock, and it collapses at the base and the whole building comes down.”

In 1999, Turkey was hit by a devastating earthquake in the northwestern city of Izmit that killed more than 17,000 people and damaged around 20,000 buildings. Another strong earthquake rocked southeastern Turkey in 2011, killing nearly 500 people and prompting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then Turkey’s prime minister, to accuse property developers of poor construction practices and to compare their negligence to murder.

In 2007, Turkey introduced new building regulations for earthquake zones. But lax enforcement and shoddy construction practices persist, experts say, and have been exacerbated by a government-backed building boom that reshaped city skylines with large residential building projects that are often delivered hastily, without adequate quality control.

“People always think they are more safe if they live in new, modern buildings, but even new buildings that were advertised as ‘earthquake proof’ collapsed in Malatya and other towns,” said Erol Kirtas, a civil engineer based in Cologne, Germany, referring to his hometown in eastern Turkey. “The construction sector in Turkey prioritizes quantity and profit over quality and that is why we are faced with this devastating loss of life.”

The U.S. aid agency deploys two search and rescue teams to Turkey.

Both have experience responding to earthquakes around the world, including in Japan, Mexico and Nepal.

The United States is one of several countries that said it would dispatch rescue teams to the earthquake zone, including Britain, India, Israel and several nations from the European Union.

The 78-member team deploying from Los Angeles County to Turkey will include not only firefighters, but also paramedics, rescue specialists, physicians and structural engineers from other agencies, Chief Marrone said. He said the team members were traveling with dogs that are trained to find people under rubble.

“They are going to put their lives on the line,” he said. “Make no doubt about it. I pray for their safety and their return, and the fact that can actually make an impactful difference for the people that are suffering.”

The other American team traveling to Turkey is based in Fairfax County, Va., and is approximately the same size. Samantha Power, the U.S.A.I.D. administrator, said in a statement on Monday that the California and Virginia teams would be part of a larger disaster response team that is working with the Turkish authorities.

“Entire countries are paralyzed or weakened when faced with a catastrophe like this and expend all their human and financial resources,” he went on. “So what about a population who have been under war for 12 years and has no peace or security or any infrastructure?”

People afraid of aftershocks spent a night sleeping in cars and in makeshift shelters.

Here’s how to help victims of the earthquake.

Before you make a donation, especially to a lesser-known organization, you should do some research to make sure it is reputable. Sites like Charity Navigator and Guidestar grade nonprofits based on transparency and effectiveness. The Internal Revenue Service also allows you to search its database to find out whether an organization is eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions.

And if you suspect an organization or individual of committing fraud, you can report it to the National Center for Disaster Fraud, part of the Justice Department.

Many national and international organizations are helping.

The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, better known as UNICEF, said it is in Syria and prioritizing water, sanitation, hygiene and nutrition, and also focusing on helping unaccompanied children locate their families. UNICEF is accepting donations.

Global Giving, which helps local nonprofit agencies, is collecting donations to help fund emergency medical workers’ ability to provide food, shelter and medicine, among other necessities. As needs in Turkey and Syria change, the organization will focus on long-term assistance, it said.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is requesting donations for its Disaster Response Emergency Fund so it can send “immediate cash assistance.”

OXFAM, an international organization that fights poverty, said it is working with women’s cooperatives in Turkey to determine an appropriate immediate and long-term response plan. It is accepting donations.

CARE, an organization that works with impoverished communities, is accepting donations that will go toward food, shelter and hygiene kits, among other items.

Doctors Without Borders, which responds to medical emergencies around the world, is collecting donations.

The Syrian American Medical Society, a United States-based humanitarian group that supplies medical care in Syria and nearby countries, is collecting donations to deliver emergency aid. At least one of its hospitals in northwestern Syria, Al Dana, received major damage.

Save the Children is accepting donations for its Children’s Emergency Fund, which will help provide children with food, shelter and warm clothing.

The Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, which since 2012 has provided medical relief and health care services inside Syria and to Syrian refugees in Turkey, is collecting money.

Alyssa Lukpat contributed reporting.

U.N. relief efforts are stymied by the quake’s destruction.

“We are looking to mobilize emergency funds in the region,” said Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman for the U.N. secretary general. “The earthquake is expected to disrupt aid operations in northwestern Syria, given the impact on roads, the supply chains and logistical facilities.”

Adding to the challenge, Turkey has taken in 3.6 million Syrian war refugees, the most of any country, and many are clustered along the border. In fact, Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees in the world, according to U.N. data.

In Syria, part of the relief effort falls in government territory and part in opposition-held territory. Aid to the government-held areas must be coordinated through the Syrian government in Damascus and it is not clear if the U.N. will receive permission to enter the opposition-held territories, Mr. Dujarric said.

The U.N. has access to the opposition-held areas through just one border crossing in Turkey, near Gaziantep, the epicenter of the quake. The U.N.’s main hub for operations is based there, as are leading staff members from various agencies working in the area.

The global agency’s resources had already been overstretched by a series of crises, including the war in Ukraine.

“The short answer: We will need money, this has been devastating,” Mr. Dujarric said, adding the agency must assess what is needed and then raise funds.

The U.N’s refugee agency, U.N.H.C.R., said it was not fully operational because the earthquake had damaged its offices and warehouses, and staff members had also been disrupted. Trucks carrying relief goods and heavy machinery needed for search and rescue operations have to cross from Turkey into Syria, and it could take as long as eight to 10 hours for them to reach stricken areas, said Rula Amin, the senior U.N.H.C.R. spokesman in the Middle East region.

Syrian refugees’ needs go far beyond the immediate vicinity of the earthquake. U.N.H.C.R. shared a video of refugee tent camps in Lebanon that had been shaken by the quake that were also flooded with water after a night of storms.

“You are talking about a very vulnerable community who have no means to save themselves from the war, the poverty and now the earthquake,” Ms. Amin said in a telephone interview from Amman, Jordan.

‘Dear God,’ I wondered, ‘what did we do to deserve all this?’

I found our little girl near our feet, grabbed her and shouted to my wife, Ghena Alkhashen, to wake up and run with me. My wife managed to grab the top half of her prayer garment and throw it over her head but I told her not to stop to get fully dressed. Your life is more important, I told her. I grabbed the keys.

But as we ran toward the front door of our home near the city of Idlib, in northwestern Syria’s Idlib Province, the shaking intensified and we were thrown against the walls. When I finally managed to get to the door, I couldn’t steady my hand enough to put the key in the lock. It took me about 15 seconds to unlock the front door and we bolted outside, barefoot, onto the cold, wet road.

“Baba, is this Bashar al-Assad doing tugh tugh?” Layal asked me.

We live in the town of Binnish, a few miles from the front line in Syria’s long civil war. In my daughter’s four years she has learned the sounds of shelling, airstrikes and warplanes. She refers to all of them as “tugh tugh.”

This time, what she heard was actually the sound of the stone minarets of the nearby mosques crashing down.

As our neighbors started pouring out of their front doors and into the freezing rain, like us they were all barefoot and dressed in their pajamas.

Once the shaking finally stopped, I ran back inside to grab my cellphone and call family members in Syria and southern Turkey to make sure everyone was ok.

Then I drove to other parts of the province to see what was happening. The roads were packed with ambulances and civil defense vehicles. All I could see were crumbled walls everywhere.

A thought kept nagging me as I drove: Dear God, what did we do to deserve all this? Dictatorship, war, massacres and now an earthquake. God, be merciful on us. Why is this all happening to us? Is this a test from God for us to be patient?

It was a conversation I would have with people I met throughout the day.

Everywhere I went I heard the same sounds: metal against stone, people crying and others loudly praying or appealing to God.

In the town of Atarib the sights were indescribable. Most of the buildings were gone, entire areas the size of soccer fields were demolished.

It felt like we were reliving the days of massacres carried out by Syrian government airstrikes. The same scent of blood in the air. In place of the constant fear that another rocket would hit, we were afraid of the next aftershock. There were dozens, keeping our nerves on edge.

I watched civil defense workers excavate people from the rubble, some alive and some dead. Most of them were unrecognizable, their faces mangled and covered in gray dust.

At times I couldn’t help but cry as I stood with people waiting to see their loved ones be pulled out from under the debris of their homes.

I imagined myself in their place and couldn’t contain myself anymore.

Raja Abdulrahim contributed reporting.

For Syrians who endured a brutal civil war, the suffering is all too familiar.

Buildings that were damaged but still standing after the first earthquake collapsed in the aftershocks. Videos posted online showed people running away seconds before structures crumbled in clouds of dust. Witnesses said that even relatively new buildings, hastily constructed, had fallen.

“I’m still hearing buildings are collapsing here and there, old buildings, new ones even,” said Ziad Ubari, who owns a pharmaceutical factory in Aleppo. “Every hour I hear that maybe 40 buildings have fallen in the past hour.”

When the earthquake first struck in the early hours of the morning, the streets of the city were full of terrified residents in their pajamas and underwear in freezing temperatures, he said.

“They just wanted to survive,” he said. “Such terrifying moments.”

In one video, women carried their children on an Aleppo street in thick winter blankets a man yelled repeatedly as first one and then a second building suddenly fell, filling the street with dust. Aerial footage released by the emergency service group known as the White Helmets showed entire rows of buildings flattened into unrecognizable piles of rubble.

Rescuers fought against the cold and rain to dig through the wreckage, and despite cold and rain, told people to evacuate their homes and stay in open areas. Schools opened to shelter people, another echo of their wartime experience.

Scenes from hospitals resembled those from the height of the war, with wards full of patients sharing beds and doctors treating victims in every corner.

Dr. Salloum said he received an urgent call soon after the earthquake, asking him to go to a hospital just outside Idlib, dug deep underground during the war to protect it from airstrikes. The drive took more than twice as long as usual due to debris in the streets.

And his arrival was daunting. “The dead were piled in the halls,” he said, estimating that at least 50 bodies lined the hospital corridors. “Every moment fresh bodies were being brought in, they did not stop. Many of them were children.”

One boy, about 6 years old, died as Mr. Salloum was administering CPR. “I saw the life leave his face,” Dr. Salloum said.

“All the traumatic images from my work during the war flooded back to me,” he added. “I felt like I was waking in a recurring nightmare.”

At a maternity hospital in Idlib, the power failed as seven women were undergoing cesarean deliveries, said the hospital manager, Ikram Habboush.

Mark Kaye, a spokesman for the International Rescue Committee, said that even before the earthquake, the aid group was worried about freezing temperatures this week in Syria and many people’s inability to heat their homes.

“We implore that if countries are sending rescue teams to Turkey that they not forget Syria,” he said.

“Anywhere else in the world this would be an emergency,” he added. “What we have in Syria is an emergency within an emergency.”

Despite an enormous rescue effort, many people are waiting for help.

The rescue efforts were hampered by snow and cold. Around 9 p.m. local time in Kahramanmaras, the epicenter of the quake, the temperature stood at around 40 Fahrenheit.

“This is a race against time and hypothermia,” said Mikdat Kadioglu, a professor of meteorology and disaster management at Istanbul Technical University. “People got caught in sleepwear and have been under the rubble for 17 hours,” he said.

The Turkish government sent four helicopters full of rescue teams to Hatay, the country’s southernmost province. Lying to the southwest of the earthquake’s epicenter, it is home to 1.6 million people, bordered by Syria to the east and south, and the Mediterranean to the west. Television coverage showed some of them digging through debris for survivors.

In one city in Hatay, Antakya, a resident who lost his home, Fehim Zeydan, said: “People are trying to save their family members with their bare hands. There is not even a shovel.”

“The municipality office I work in, the governor’s residence, the health directorate building, were destroyed,” Mr. Zeydan added.

The authorities said some rescue teams were still en route to the disaster areas but were hindered by snow and rain. “All the resources of the country deployed to the disaster zone,” said Yunus Sezer, the head of AFAD, Turkey’s emergency agency, in a televised news conference.

According to official figures, in Hayat Province alone, at least 1,200 buildings were destroyed, 520 people were killed, 700 were wounded and an unknown number remained trapped under the rubble.

Mr. Zeydan said he ran to a park during the predawn tremor and waited there until sunrise, then walked around the city to survey the damage, which he called extensive.

In a video he recorded and provided to The New York Times, a wounded man on a blanket lies on the ground, screaming as three other men try to lift him into a wheelchair.

“Why isn’t here one helicopter, or one drone flying over?” Mr. Zeydan said. “We are all alone.”

Two rescue teams were working in Antakya, according to the mayor of Hatay, Lutfu Savas.

“We do our best, but some of our own colleagues are under debris,” he said. “We need help from outside. We need rescue support.”

“The municipality cannot handle this alone,” he added.

Eren Can, a lawyer who lives in Istanbul, said that he had no word about his elderly parents, whose building in Antakya had collapsed, and that he was sure they were buried in the wreckage. But Mr. Can, who got in his car early Monday with his brother to try to drive to Antakya, said rescuers had not yet reached their parents’ neighborhood.

“I am on the road, hoping that they can be rescued,” he said. “I am trying at the same time to push the rescue work to start.”

How earthquakes in 1999 recast diplomacy between Turkey and Greece.

The period of “earthquake diplomacy” began in the aftermath of a 7.6 magnitude quake in August 1999 centered near the town of Izmit, south of Istanbul. Official figures show 17,000 people were killed and many buildings were destroyed.

Greece dispatched help to its neighbor swiftly, defying both the dire state of relations at the time and the fact that Turkey is Greece’s former occupier and widely regarded as its archenemy.

Four weeks later, it was Turkey’s turn to reciprocate.

A massive tremor hit Athens; at least 143 people were killed and infrastructure was flattened. The Greek calamity, while on a much smaller scale, drew immediate help from Turkey.

George Papandreou, who served as Greece’s foreign minister at the time and later became prime minister, remembered those days as trying to make something positive out of devastation. He and his counterpart in Turkey, Ismail Cem, were the architects of earthquake diplomacy.

“These earthquakes show how much we have in common and how, in the end, the animosity between our two countries is not shared by our peoples. It’s often fueled by leaders who may use it for their own purposes,” he said in an interview on Monday.

The two countries, both NATO members, have been locked in a centuries-long antagonism. Turkey, the significantly larger and better-armed of the two, consistently makes claims on Greece’s territory and borders; Greece decries its neighbor as expansionist and aggressive.

As both Greece and Turkey gear up for elections this year, distrust and tensions have been growing. Analysts warn that an incident could trigger an armed confrontation, putting NATO in uncharted waters as it tries to stick together to support Ukraine.

Ian Lesser, an expert in the region and former American official who heads the German Marshall Fund’s operation in Brussels, said that, despite obvious differences between 1999 and today, the momentum for cooperation in the aftermath of tragic events can be sustained.

“It underscores the reality that, from the perspective of a society, security is not just about the defense of borders, but it’s also about the kind of security people seek in the face of disasters. The response cannot be unilateral: even quite capable countries like Turkey need the support of allies, even adversaries, to tackle them,” he said.

The political forces unleashed by an event of this magnitude have the potential to alter the course of diplomacy in the region, Mr. Lesser added.

“Even at a basic level, it’s hard to imagine a serious incident between Greece and Turkey today,” he said. “And there’s been a real risk of that.”

Hours after the first quake, the region was hit by an unusually large aftershock.

The 7.5 aftershock was well above average, and was about one-third as powerful as the 7.8 quake. From statistical analyses of quakes worldwide, the most powerful aftershock Monday would have been expected to be about magnitude 6.8, or only about one-thirtieth as powerful as the first quake.

“There’s nothing magic about aftershock magnitude,” said Susan Hough, a seismologist with the United States Geological Survey. Sometimes an aftershock is even larger than the initial quake, Dr. Hough said, in which case the aftershock is considered the main quake and the first one is referred to as a foreshock.

Aftershocks can occur on the same fault as the main earthquake, or on nearby faults that are affected by the stress changes. This aftershock was centered about 60 miles north of the initial quake.

Aftershocks also can continue to occur for weeks or months following a strong quake, with their frequency and strength gradually declining.

The earthquakes on Monday occurred on the East Anatolian Fault Zone, part of a complex system of faults in Turkey that make the region one of the most seismically active in the world. Another fault zone, the North Anatolian, has caused many large earthquakes, including a 1999 quake centered about 60 miles from Istanbul that killed more than 15,000 people.

All of these are strike-slip faults, meaning the blocks of crust move horizontally relative to one another when strains between them reach a breaking point. Dr. Hough said that given the magnitude of the first quake on Monday, it’s likely that the movement occurred along 120 miles or so of the fault.

After the initial break, near Gaziantep in south central Turkey, the rupture would have propagated along the fault at about 2 miles a second, Dr. Hough said. This would help account for the lengthy shaking, which some witnesses said lasted for 90 seconds or longer.

Large strike-slip fault zones on land are not common , Dr. Hough said; the San Andreas Fault in California is another example. But those on land can be extremely destructive, because they tend to be close to population centers, and they can be fairly shallow, increasing the shaking felt at the surface.

Some quakes are centered more than a hundred miles below the surface, but the initial shock on Monday occurred at a depth of about 11 miles.

In some cases the destruction from strike-slip earthquakes is more widespread than from larger quakes that occur in so-called subduction zones, where one large crustal plate is sliding beneath another. Subduction zones, like those that exist around the rim of the Pacific Ocean, are usually offshore and tremors occur at greater depth. Most of the destruction in those cases often comes from a tsunami, as occurred in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan.

Turkish state broadcaster TRT reports that four members of a family were pulled from a collapsed building in Diyarbakir city centre after they were trapped for more than 17 hours.