More than 4,300 people have died as a result of the succession of earthquakes registered on Monday in southern Turkey, near the Syrian border, according to updated casualty figures provided by the authorities of both countries.
Search and rescue efforts continue, due to the magnitude of the disaster, following the earthquake that has completely destroyed thousands of buildings, so it is expected that the number of victims in both Turkey and Syria will increase considerably.
On the one hand, the Turkish authorities have reported the death of 2,921 people, as well as 15,834 injured, according to the president of the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), Yunus Sezer, according to the Anatolia agency.
AFAD estimates that more than 6,200 buildings have been completely destroyed, mainly as a result of the 7.4 earthquake that shook the country early in the morning and a subsequent earthquake at midday that reached magnitude 7.6 on the Richter scale.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called the event «the biggest disaster since the 1939 earthquake,» which left more than 30,000 dead. Authorities estimate that more than a hundred aftershocks of the first major quake have been recorded.
On the other hand, the earthquake has left more than 700 dead and 1,430 injured in Syrian government-controlled areas, according to provisional data from the Ministry of Health, which indicate that the victims are from the provinces of Aleppo, Latakia, Hama, Idlib and Tartus.
«The alert continues in all public and private health facilities, and all health cadres are working at maximum capacity, and the ongoing response is being coordinated in the various governorates,» reads the statement from the Syrian Health portfolio on its Facebook profile.
To these figures must be added more than 700 dead and 2,000 wounded in the areas controlled by the rebels in the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, in the northwest of the Arab country, according to the Syrian Civil Defense, known as ‘white helmets’, through its Twitter account, where it has lamented «the catastrophe and devastation» caused by the earthquake.
The ‘white helmets’ have also appealed to «all humanitarian organizations and international agencies to provide material and assistance support to the organizations» in order to «respond to this disaster and urgently help the victims of the earthquake».
Thus, they have detailed that about 210 buildings «have totally collapsed» because of the earthquake, while more than 440 have been «partially destroyed» and that «thousands more have suffered damage».
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
