A first aid convoy entered Syria on Tuesday in the direction of the rebel areas in the north, eight days after the earthquake which killed more than 35,000 people in this country and in Turkey, the “worst natural disaster in a century in Europe”, according to the World Health Organization.
On the same day, the UN Secretary General launched an appeal for donations of nearly 400 million dollars to meet over “a period of three months” the “tremendous needs” of the populations affected by the earthquake in Syria.
Antonio Guterres urged all member states of the United Nations to provide “without delay” this sum to guarantee “humanitarian aid which nearly five million Syrians desperately need”, starting with “shelter, medical care, food”.
“We all know that life-saving aid is not coming in at the necessary speed and scale,” he insisted, adding that a similar appeal is expected soon for Turkey.
With chances of finding survivors in Turkey and Syria dwindling to near zero, the priority now is to care for the hundreds of thousands if not millions of people whose homes were destroyed by the 7.8 magnitude earthquake of February 6.
“We are witnessing the worst natural disaster in the WHO Europe region in a century and we are still measuring its magnitude,” noted a World Health Organization official during the course. of a press conference.
And its balance sheet is growing inexorably, it could even double, warned the UN on Sunday.
Tuesday midday it amounted to 35,662 dead – 31,974 officially in southern Turkey, while the authorities counted 3,688 in Syria.
On the Syrian side, for the first time since 2020, a convoy carrying aid entered the rebel areas in the north on Tuesday through the Bab al-Salama border post with Turkey, an AFP journalist saw.
It is made up of 11 International Organization for Migration (IOM) trucks loaded with, among other things, tents, mattresses, blankets and mats.
The Bab al-Salama border crossing connects Turkish territory to the north of the province of Aleppo controlled by Syrian factions loyal to Ankara. It had been closed to UN humanitarian aid under pressure from Russia, an ally of the Damascus regime.
Areas beyond the control of the latter in the north of the province of Aleppo and in that of Idleb (north-west), where nearly three million inhabitants live, are among the most affected by the earthquake in Syria.
This country had previously announced the opening, for an initial period of three months, of two new crossing points with Turkey in order to speed up the arrival of humanitarian aid.
The UN Secretary General welcomed this decision by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad which “will allow more aid to enter, faster”.
A UN delegation arrived on Tuesday to assess the needs of these hard-hit regions, according to an AFP correspondent.
She passed through the Bab al-Hawa border post with Turkey and then went to a World Food Program (WFP) center in Sarmada, before meeting with local officials.
According to the Syrian Ministry of Transport, 62 planes carrying aid have so far landed in Syria, including one from Saudi Arabia, the first in a decade, with more expected within hours and days. come.
In Turkey, some 1.2 million people have been housed in student hostels, more than 206,000 tents have been erected in ten provinces and 400,000 victims have been evacuated from devastated areas, the government said.
Added to extreme material deprivation is psychological distress, which hits the youngest hardest. More than seven million children – 4.6 in Turkey and 2.5 in Syria – live in the affected areas, lamented UNICEF, which fears that several thousand of them are among those killed.
“My children have been badly affected by the earthquake,” Serkan Tatoglu, whose wife and four children aged six to 15 have found refuge in a village of tents erected next to the city stadium, told AFP. Kahramanmaras.
“I lost about ten members of my family. My children still don’t know but the youngest is traumatized by the aftershocks. She keeps asking Dad, are we going to die?” he. “With my wife, we hug them and tell them everything will be fine”.
02/14/2023 18:18:22 – Bab al-Salama (Syrie) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP