“People who did not die from the earthquake have been left to die in the cold,” Hakan Tanriverdi told AFP in Adiyaman province, one of the hardest hit areas.
“No state, no police, no soldiers. What a shame! They left us to our fate,” said Mehmet Yildirim, another neighbor.
The Turkish president outlined a kind of mea culpa this Friday. “There were so many damaged buildings that unfortunately we were unable to speed up our interventions as we would have liked,” he said during a visit to Adiyaman.
cholera risk
The quake is the largest to hit Turkey since 1939, when 33,000 died in the eastern province of Erzincan.
According to the latest official balances, the earthquake, of magnitude 7.8 and which was followed by more than a hundred aftershocks, left at least 23,766 dead, 20,213 of them in Turkey and 3,553 in Syria.
The WHO estimates that 23 million people are “potentially exposed, of which about five million [son] vulnerable” and fears that a health crisis will unleash.
Humanitarian organizations expressed concern about a possible spread of cholera, which has reappeared in Syria.
The European Union sent the first rescue teams to Turkey hours after the quake struck on Monday. But initially, it offered only minimal aid to Syria, through existing humanitarian programmes, because of international sanctions imposed in the aftermath of the civil war, which broke out in 2011.
President Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma visited earthquake victims in Aleppo on Friday for the first time since the quake struck, the presidency said.