No place for the dead as graves fill up in earthquake-stricken Turkey and Syria | Turkey and Syria earthquake 2023

In the Nordagi cemetery in the Turkish province of Gaziantep, on the Syrian border, there will soon be no place for the dead. The freshly dug graves bear blank headstones, with only torn pieces of cloth collected from the clothes of the victims for identification. The slightly frayed ends of the fabric are blowing in the frosty air.

In the street outside, dozens of corpses are piled on top of each other on a row of pickup trucks, waiting to be buried. No less than five imams rushed to Nordagi to administer a steady stream of mass funerals, sometimes for as many as 10 victims at once. Officials brought shipments of coffins from nearby villages as far as Istanbul to provide a final resting place for the myriad bodies arriving in the city.

Five days after two powerful earthquakes rocked southern Turkey in the country’s worst natural disaster in a generation, the death toll has exceeded 21,000, and Nordagi and cities in southern Turkey and northern Syria are witnessing scenes of appalling levels of destruction.

Earthquake damage in Nordaga. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

“40 percent of the people who lived in this town can move away,” said Sadik Güneş, an imam in Nordağı. His house was next to the mosque, which collapsed. Without a place for prayer, mass funerals in Nordağı and the rest of southern Turkey are celebrated outdoors.

“I lost count of the bodies we buried since Monday,” Güneş said. “We built an expansion of the cemetery. There are still people under the rubble. We will bury those too as soon as we get them back. We bury the bodies even late at night with the help of the citizens who come to our aid.”

Awaiting the arrival of forensic doctors and prosecutors, residents of some cities in Turkey have piled up corpses in playgrounds or in parking lots in order to give relatives a chance to quickly identify their loved ones before a death certificate is issued.

In Kahramanmaraş, emergency workers continued combing through the wreckage, often finding only body parts. An emergency worker described how she tried to identify a severed arm, showing it to bereaved families in hopes of using the remaining nail polish color to put a name on the deceased.

Earthquake damage in Pazardik, Turkey. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

“This is where I lived,” Saadi Aujar said, pointing to his destroyed house. “It was a new apartment. We purchased these two units a few weeks ago. One for my family and kids, one for my mom and dad. My mom and dad lived two blocks away. They were supposed to move upstairs this week. We even put up the curtains with my mom a few days ago. After the earthquake, my mother and father’s house collapsed.

He added, “I dug with my hands among the rubble and pulled out my mother and father. After that, I had to bury her with my own hands as well.”

In the Afrin region of northeastern Syria, a cemetery has been expanded with temporary mass burial sites. In an Ottoman city in southern Turkey, a cemetery has run out of space, while outside Kahramanmaras, near the epicenter, a makeshift cemetery is filled with so many corpses that planks of wood and concrete blocks scooped up from the debris serve as tombstones.

Earthquake damage in Pazardzhik. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

In Jindris, northwest Syria, a town full of people displaced by a decade of civil war, refugees who survived bombing and chemical gas attacks are once again running for their lives as buildings collapse.

When the first quake struck in the early hours of Monday morning, Abu Majid al-Shaar was rocked awake as the ground shook violently, and he slammed his head into a wall. He grabbed as many of his children as he could and ran down the stairs to the street.

“There were some people I couldn’t reach,” he said. “There are only two survivors from our extended family. We have lost so many family members.”

Fleeing Jenderes in the aftermath of the earthquake brought back painful memories of the family’s evacuation from their hometown in Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus devastated by Syrian government airstrikes and a prolonged siege.

Freshly excavated graves are blank headstones, with only pieces of cloth collected from the victims’ clothes for identification, at Nordage Cemetery. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

He said, “The memories flashed back when that whole town was destroyed, and I felt the exact same situation and it reminded me of my seven brothers who died in a building collapse after an airstrike on our building.” “And now, when we had to dig up the rubble at Jenders for my other brother and the rest of our family, my heart broke again.

Yasser Abu Ammar, a member of the Syrian Civil Defense known as the White Helmets, a group that has worked for years to pull people out from the rubble of buildings destroyed by airstrikes, entered Jenderes in the hours after the first earthquake and overcame it. destruction.

More than 100 buildings filled with families were reduced to rubble. “I was struck by the horror of the scene,” he said. “The devastation in the city was terrifying.”

Rescue efforts continued throughout the week, slowed by a lack of machinery and aid. Idlib remained largely closed off from the outside world until six UN trucks arrived in the province on Thursday, providing a lifeline of vital goods days after the earthquake.

Across northern Syria, people now living in tents amid the snow have begun burning whatever they can to keep warm. Food and other basic commodities remained scarce.

“The world has forgotten about us,” said Muhammad Abu Hamza, who fled Jenderes, experiencing displacement for the second time after fleeing Ghouta with his family.

“We have enough food to last us a little while,” he said. “But for heating, we have a little wood which we burn only a few hours a day to be able to survive as long as possible. Somehow we were left to face this situation on our own.”

People gather around a fire in front of a destroyed building in Nordağı. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

Survivors are still being found in a few places. In Hatay, a 30-year-old man was pulled from the rubble more than 100 hours after the earthquake.

On the road from Nordage, a group of people stood around a fire, and gathered to find the survivors. “Moments ago, we pulled out a little girl from under the rubble,” said Suleiman Shaheen, one of the rescuers.

Yet miracles were rare. Several families said that in the first 24 hours after the earthquake, they could make out the faint voices of relatives under the rubble.

Then, slowly, silence fell over the piles of concrete and brick that were once houses, now cemeteries.

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