The United Nations and its humanitarian partners will this week launch flash appeals for urgently-needed funds to provide relief to thousands of victims in the earthquake-hit Turkiye and Syria, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths has said.
Griffiths was speaking in the Turkish city of KahramanmaraÅŸ where recovery efforts are ongoing in frigid temperatures. the UN said in a press release released in New York.
The top relief official met with families left homeless by the disaster and listened to their stories of shock and devastation.
He also spoke with search and rescue teams as they carried out their operations in the devastated central parts of the city, amid collapsed buildings with excavation equipment digging through the debris.
UN teams are already on the ground, and more than 130 countries have dispatched responders, sniffer dogs, experts and other personnel.
“There has never been an international response, a Turkish response, to a natural disaster, as we see here in these terrible days,” Griffiths said.
He praised the courage of people, including parents, who are working round the clock in efforts to rescue their families and children from the rubble – “hoping for one more sound, for one more person to survive.”
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It is estimated that more than 22,000 people have died in the double earthquake, which struck southeastern Turkiye and northern Syria early on Monday morning.
Millions more have been left homeless, including Syrians displaced by the 12-year war in their homeland and thousands of refugees who have fled across the border.
For Griffiths, the next phase will be to look after those affected by the tragedy, the press release said. “And I’ve met some of them already today,” he said, “people who’ve lost their homes, whose children don’t have schools to go to, who have no food, who have no money, who depend on the generosity of the Turkish people, the Turkish government and the international community.”
Griffiths is expected to visit the UN-authorized cross-border operation to Syria in the south of Turkiye on Sunday before traveling there.
Meanwhile, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, arrived in Aleppo, Syria, on Saturday.
“I’m heartbroken to see the conditions survivors are facing – freezing weather and extremely limited access to shelter, food, water, heat and medical care,” he wrote in a post on his official Twitter account.
In a separate tweet, Tedros recounted how he met two babies, Nour and Omar, who lost their parents in the earthquake.
