Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared a state of emergency in areas ravaged by the region’s worst earthquake in decades, as his government and aid agencies mounted a desperate rescue effort to locate survivors.
The three-month emergency rule, which will run up to just before Turkey’s hotly contested general election in May, gives Erdoğan’s government extraordinary powers to stem the humanitarian crisis caused by the huge quake that struck south-eastern Turkey and neighbouring Syria on Monday.
More than 5,000 people have been confirmed dead across the two countries after the biggest quake to hit the region in eight decades struck near the city of Gaziantep. The death toll is expected to keep rising, with many people still trapped beneath the rubble.
The emergency powers, which were applied across Turkey following a coup attempt in 2016, enable Erdoğan to rule by decree, bypassing parliament and regional authorities run by opposition parties. The measures can also curtail fundamental rights, a particularly sensitive issue in south-eastern Turkey, which fell under emergency rule during the country’s decades-long conflict with outlawed Kurdish separatist groups.
Authorities in Turkey and Syria were racing to move aid to the affected areas and help victims trapped in the rubble, but damaged roads, bad weather and disruption to communications have hampered their attempts to stem a worsening crisis.
More than 10,000 people were involved in Turkey’s rescue effort, with aid organisations mobilising to provide basic necessities such as food and shelter. Turkish television showed collapsed buildings, mangled metal and buckled roads across the region, where strong aftershocks were felt.
“It’s now a race against time. Every minute, every hour that passes, the chances of finding survivors alive diminishes,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, World Health Organization director-general. “Numbers do not tell us about the perilous situation that many families now face, having lost everything [and] forced to sleep outside in the middle of winter.”
The death toll in Turkey had on Tuesday reached 3,549 and a further 1,622 had been killed in Syria, according to official sources and groups operating in rebel-held areas of Syria.
Aid groups working in Syria’s Idlib region, one of the remaining enclaves controlled by the opposition where more than 4mn people have sought sanctuary from the country’s 12-year conflict, said they were struggling.
The UN said aid delivery into Syria from Turkey was suspended because of logistical issues. Northern Syria is dependent on humanitarian aid and supplies delivered through the part of Turkey devastated by the quake.
Kieren Barnes, Syria director for the Mercy Corps aid group, said the initial period after the quake had been characterised by “chaos, confusion, fear”.
“Today, we start to get a clearer picture of what’s going on, we start to build our plans, pull together and respond,” he said. “There’s obviously going to be huge pressure in Turkey as well for supplies. So this is going to be a scramble for resources over the coming days and weeks.”
Turkish television broadcast wall-to-wall coverage of one of the worst natural disasters in modern Turkish history. Witnesses in Hatay province described hearing cries for help from people stuck under the rubble that went unanswered as rescuers struggled to reach the area
Authorities closed roads to Hatay and the cities of Kahramanmaraş and Adıyaman to anyone besides rescue and aid vehicles, as they attempted to overcome the logistical challenges posed by the disaster. Some people on the ground complained rescuers were either too slow or had failed to appear while they battled with a lack of clean water and electricity.
In a sign of the potential economic fallout, Turkey’s benchmark Bist 100 stock index lost 7 per cent, triggering curbs designed to smooth panicky trading. The Turkish lira also reached a new low, according to Bloomberg data, after a long slide caused in large part by the government’s unorthodox policy of lowering interest rates despite scorching inflation.
Teams of Turkish rescue workers have been filtering through Istanbul’s main airport since Monday, many sleeping on the floor as they waited for their flights.
“We have to do everything we can to help,” said Sinan Aksoy, 34, a firefighter who was on his way to the southern city of Adana with a group of about 50 volunteers. “We’re running against time to find people alive.”
Erdoğan said about TL100bn ($5.3bn) would be made available to help the quake-hit region. About 54,000 tents, 100,000 mattresses and 50,000 beds were also being sent to the area.
Experts said the low quality of buildings and lack of earthquake resilience contributed to the destruction. Many buildings were “not designed from seismic considerations to absorb this much ground motion”, said Kishor Jaiswal, a scientist at the US Geological Survey.
“It’s difficult to watch this tragedy unfold, especially since we’ve known for a long time about how poorly the buildings in the region tend to behave in earthquakes,” he added.