The federal government will contribute an extra $8 million to Australia’s response to the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.
The funding takes Australia’s contribution to $18 million.
The extra $4.5 million provided to Turkey will go to Australian non-government organisations helping to protect those made most vulnerable by the earthquakes, as well as search and rescue efforts and other emerging needs.
As well, $3.5 million will be provided to the United Nations Population Fund to deliver maternal and child health services and protect women and girls without safe housing in Syria.
“We extend Australia’s deepest sympathies to families and communities that have lost loved ones in the earthquakes, including families here in Australia,” Foreign Minister Penny Wong said.
“The earthquakes have also exacerbated the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Syria, where years of conflict have driven millions from their homes.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Wednesday visited the Turkish embassy in Canberra to sign a condolence book.
The combined death toll from the 7.8 magnitude quake that struck last week has topped 41,000.
“We are facing one of the greatest natural disasters not only in our country but also in the history of humanity,” Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan said in a televised speech in Ankara.
Meanwhile, the Emergency Action Alliance – a group of 15 leading Australian NGOs – has raised more than $1 million for the earthquake efforts since launching its appeal last week.
“EAA’s member organisations and their local partners on the ground have been working around the clock to provide immediate, life-saving aid to the emergency response and we’re so grateful to Australians around the country who have donated to make this possible,” EAA executive director Kerren Morris said.
EAA members including Oxfam Australia, Save the Children Australia, Caritas Australia, Plan International Australia, and ActionAid Australia, are in the two devastated countries providing food, water, winter clothing, kitchen sets, health and hygiene kits, blankets and shelter tents, as well as financial support.
FIVE MORE RESCUED IN TURKEY
Three women and two children were pulled from rubble in Turkey even as hopes to find survivors from last week’s devastating earthquake dwindled and the focus switched to giving survivors some relief.
Rescuers could be seen applauding and embracing each other in a video posted to social media on Wednesday as an ambulance carried away a 74-year-old woman rescued after more than nine days trapped in rubble.
Earlier in the day, a 46-year-old woman was rescued in the same city, close to the epicentre of the quake.
Later on Wednesday a woman named Ela and her children Meysam and Ali were pulled from the rubble of an apartment block in Antakya, 228 hours after the earthquake, state-owned Anadolu news agency reported.
The combined death toll in Turkey and Syria has climbed over 41,000, and millions are in need over humanitarian aid, with many survivors having been left homeless in near-freezing winter temperatures. Rescues are now few and far between.
In hard-hit Kahramanmaras, where the earthquake forced hundreds of families to live in tents erected in a stadium in freezing temperatures, empty buildings with their walls ripped open showed the power of the earthquake.
With much of the region’s sanitation infrastructure damaged or rendered inoperable by the earthquakes, health authorities face a daunting task in trying to ensure that survivors now remain disease-free.
“We haven’t been able to rinse off since the earthquake,” said Mohammad Emin, a 21-year-old graphic design student, as he carried flu medicine from the clinic of the city’s open-air stadium.
Meanwhile, the government encouraged people to go back home, if and when authorities have deemed their building safe.
Across the border, in Syria, relief efforts have been hampered by a civil war that has splintered the country and divided regional and global powers.
Civil war enmities have obstructed at least two attempts to send aid across frontlines into the hard-hit northwest, but an aid convoy reached the area overnight.
Organised by Arab tribes, trucks loaded with blankets, food, medical supplies and tents arrived overnight in the insurgent-held rebel northwest from a region controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, a Reuters witness saw.
Parts of the provinces of Idlib and adjacent Aleppo held by Turkey-backed rebels suffered the bulk of the quake’s casualties in Syria: over 4,400 of a death toll of more than 5,800, according to the United Nations and government authorities.
Hassan Mohamed, a civil defence volunteer, said that while efforts to find survivors in the most badly hit areas in northwest Syria had finished, rescue workers were still deploying in response to reports of people missing. “We are also going to areas where there has been no internet,” he said.
BUILDING BACK
Turkey has turned its focus to reconstruction, encouraging those in quake-hit areas whose buildings have been deemed safe to return home.
In neighbouring Syria’s opposition-held northwest, which was already suffering from more than a decade of bombardment, the earthquake left many war-weary families fending for themselves amid the rubble, with international aid arriving slowly.
The combined death toll in the two countries has climbed over 41,000, and millions are in need over humanitarian aid, with many survivors having been left homeless in near-freezing winter temperatures, and rescues now few and far between.
In Turkey’s southern Hatay province, half of the buildings had collapsed, been heavily damaged or needed to be demolished quickly, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said on Wednesday.
But the government encouraged people to go back home – if they can, based on government checks.
“We want citizens to track their building’s status on the online system and get back into the buildings which receive safe building report from the urbanisation ministry, in order to start getting back to normal,” Tourism Minister Nuri Ersoy told a news conference in Malatya, some 160 kilometres from the epicentre of the earthquake.
“We will quickly demolish what needs to be demolished and build safe houses,” Environment and Urbanisation Minister Murat Kurum tweeted.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s stock index soared almost 10 per cent on reopening after five days of earthquake-related closure as government measures to prop equities looked to be working, but analysts warned sentiment was fragile.
Late on Tuesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to press on with rescue and recovery efforts after nine were pulled from the rubble that day.
A 42-year-old woman was rescued from the rubble of a building in the southern Turkish city of Kahramanmaras on Wednesday, almost 222 hours after a devastating earthquake struck the region, Turkish media reported.
But UN authorities have said the rescue phase is coming to a close, with the focus turning to shelter, food and schooling.
The Turkish toll was 35,418 killed, Erdogan said. More than 5814 have died in Syria, according to a Reuters tally of reports from Syrian state media and a UN agency.
In Syria, relief efforts have been hampered by a civil war that has splintered the country and divided regional and global powers. The single border crossing from Turkey to Syria was closed for days before UN trucks were allowed through.
On Tuesday, eight days after the quake, a second border crossing for aid delivery was opened after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gave his assent, marking a shift for Damascus which has long opposed cross-border aid deliveries to the rebel enclave.
But the move was met with scepticism and even anger by many residents of Idlib, where a bulk of the four million residents hail from other bombed-out provinces.
The trucks included none of the heavy equipment and machines that rescuers say they need to remove rubble faster – and that could have helped with reconstruction.
