19 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Turkish agency for disaster management, AFAD, has raised this Sunday the number of deaths from the earthquakes on February 6 in the south of the country to 41,020 fatalities, according to the official Turkish news agency Anatolia.
To this figure must be added the fatalities from the earthquake in northwestern Syria, which are much more difficult to calculate. The United Nations estimates that between 4,000 and 4,400 people have died in the area, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Thus, the earthquakes would have left approximately more than 45,000 deaths, each time closer to the initial estimate of the UN, which estimated the total number of fatalities at least 50,000.
The president of the organization, Yunus Sezer, has also highlighted that “the search and rescue operations, for the most part, will come to an end on Sunday afternoon”, given the decrease in the chances of continuing to find survivors almost two weeks after the earthquakes.
For his part, the Turkish Defense Minister, Hulusi Akar, stressed that at this time we must appeal “to unity and solidarity”. “We will do everything possible to heal these wounds,” he explained, as reported by the Turkish state news agency, Anatolia.
Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay has detailed that more than 374,000 people have already been evacuated from the affected regions, including nearly 1,600 unaccompanied children. However, he praised that more than 950 “have already been reunited with their families.”
The regional director of emergencies for the World Health Organization (WHO), Rick Brennan, said last week from Damascus that the agency estimates that at least 9,300 would have died in Syria — some 4,800 in areas controlled by the authorities and 4,500 in areas in rebel hands–, although he qualified that right now there is no way to make an adjusted projection.
