ANTAKYA, Feb 10 (FD): The plight of hundreds of thousands of people left homeless by earthquakes in Turkey and Syria grew more desperate on Thursday, while hopes faded of many more people being found alive amid the ruins of cities.
The death toll from Monday’s quakes, which struck in the early morning, passed 17,000 on Thursday across both countries.
It was the biggest natural disaster to strike the region since 1999, when a similarly powerful quake killed more than 17,000 people in Turkey.
A Turkish official said the disaster posed “very serious difficulties” for the holding of an election scheduled for May 14 in which President Tayyip Erdogan has been expected to face the toughest challenge in his two decades in power.
With anger simmering over the slow delivery of aid and delays in getting the rescue effort underway, the disaster is bound to play into the vote should it still go ahead.
On the ground, many people in Turkey and Syria spent a third night sleeping outside or in cars in freezing winter temperatures, their homes destroyed or so shaken by the quakes they were too afraid to re-enter.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been left homeless in the middle of winter. Many have camped out in makeshift shelters in supermarket car parks, mosques, roadsides or amid the ruins, often desperate for food, water and heat.
At a gas station near the town of Kemalpasa, people picked through cardboard boxes of clothes dropped off as donations.
In the port city of Iskenderun, Reuters journalists saw people huddled round campfires on roadsides and in half-crushed garages and warehouses. The only lights were the spotlights focused on cranes trying to remove slabs of debris.
Authorities say some 6,500 buildings in Turkey collapsed and countless more were damaged in the quake zone where some 13 million people live
