Anonymous US donor provides $30 million to earthquake victims in Turkey and Syria | Turkey and Syria earthquake 2023

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An American citizen from Pakistan has made an anonymous donation of $30 million to victims of the earthquake that has killed thousands of people in Turkey and Syria and devastated the two countries’ infrastructure, according to officials.

The Pakistani businessman’s kind words provided a rare example of raising the news amid the mounting death toll and damage related to the disaster.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, tweeted on Saturday that he was “deeply touched by the form” submitted by an anonymous citizen, who entered the Turkish Embassy in Washington and made the donation in favor of the earthquake victims.

Sharif’s tweet added, “These are glorified acts of philanthropy that enable humanity to triumph over seemingly insurmountable odds.”

The editor-in-chief of the political news outlet, Election Post, Mustafa Tanyeri, tweeted that Turkey’s ambassador to Washington, Murat Merkan, confirmed the contribution to the earthquake aid campaign launched in the United States.

The donation also came after the United Nations World Food Program made appeals for $77 million to provide food rations to at least 590,000 displaced people in Turkey and 284,000 in Syria. According to the programme, about 45,000 of those were refugees, and another 545,000 were internally displaced.

As of Sunday morning in the United States, more than 33,000 people have died after the massive 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit parts of Turkey and Syria six days ago. That number is almost certain to increase as rescue crews’ expectations of finding survivors fade with each passing day.

Nearly 30,000 dead as of Sunday were in Turkey. Meanwhile, the earthquake-affected area in Syria was a northwestern part where many people had been displaced over and over again by a decade-long civil war there.

This particular area is controlled by the rebels rather than the government, so it has received little help compared to other affected areas, even as the United States temporarily eased its sanctions on Syria in hopes of speeding up the delivery of aid.

“We have so far failed the people of northwest Syria,” UN aid coordinator Martin Griffiths tweeted on Saturday from that country’s border with Turkey.

Complicating relief efforts, only one crossing on the border between Turkey and Syria is open for UN assistance.

Outside of the $30 million donation from a Pakistani businessman living in the US to earthquake victims, those following developments in Turkey and Syria had to turn to survival stories in order to delay the relentlessly rising death toll.

One such story centers on 54-year-old Syrian Malek Melandi, who survived 156 hours in the rubble left by the earthquake before being rescued by a team of Chinese rescuers and Turkish firefighters.

Meanwhile, a young child, a father with his five-year-old daughter, and a 10-year-old girl were rescued from collapsed buildings in southern Turkey about a week after the earthquake.

Reuters contributed to this report

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