A month later, relatives are still searching for earthquake victims in Turkey | Turkey and Syria earthquake 2023

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Sakın Nur Gül held up a worn-out square piece of paper, listing more than a dozen hospitals in southeastern Turkey in peruvian blue, a grim plea everywhere she and her brother tried to find their missing family members. Next to the words “intensive care unit” and “morgue” are the names of every state hospital and private hospital in the capital, Ankara, the southern cities of Adana and Mersin, and many throughout Hatay province, accompanied by delicate crosses showing where Gul, better known as Nur, and her brother, Ertuğrul, searched. Dylan did not find any trace of their parents and brother.

We went to hospitals that aren’t even on that list. “I think we went to every hospital in Hatay,” Ertugrul said. In a cemetery on the outskirts of the southern city of Antakya, where a field of hundreds of sticks lay on the graves of many unidentified bodies, the siblings searched for photos of the dead and found nothing. DNA testing did not bring up any matches between the bodies there or anywhere else.

One particular visit stopped by a facility in Mersin. “The woman behind the desk in the hospital realized she had seen me before, and asked why I’d come back,” she said, amazed. Nour explained that she was searching for her missing family. “It’s too early to do this research,” the official told her lightly.

Like thousands of others, Nur and Ertugrul say they are in a race against time to find their missing relatives, even enlisting far-flung family members to check hospitals in their home towns across the country to see if their family members are there.

Nur Gül and her brother Ertuğrul Dilin outside the Adana State Hospital, where they regularly come to inquire about missing family members. Photo: Rina Effendi/The Guardian

Searching has exhausted every waking moment since two powerful earthquakes destroyed the family’s home in central Antakya in early February. Nur and Ertugrul rushed from Nur’s house on the Aegean coast to the smoldering wreckage of what was once the eight-storey apartment building in Elke where Ertuğrul and their family lived. The siblings camped out for a week in front of the wrecked building, burning pieces of kitchen cupboards to stay warm, hoping that rescue workers would eventually pull their father, Ismet Delin, their mother, Kanan, and younger brother, Efe, from the rubble.

The Dylan siblings watched as rescuers pulled people out of the wreckage, 14 of them alive. Also found were 42 bodies, some badly burned and needing DNA testing for identification. Relatives of 28 other people, including the Delen family, paid operators of special machines to comb through the wreckage of their Emerald Street home three times to try to find a trace of missing relatives, and watched frantically as a team of German rescuers watched. The site with sniffer dogs and thermal equipment to search for what remains of the collapsed building.

“They couldn’t even find a bone from a single person, let alone 28,” said Ertuğrul, who at one point inspected the area that was the basement of the building himself to check the foundations. A week after the earthquake, Dylan’s siblings leave to begin searching hospitals, morgues, and cemeteries.

Just a pile of rubble from the remains of the building where Delen Syblings’ parents lived in Antakya. Photo: Rina Effendi/The Guardian

A month after earthquakes destroyed homes and lives across southeastern Turkey and northern Syria, leaving a scar of destruction across a wide swath of land and killing more than 50,000 people, relatives of the missing wander among the rubble and fields of mass graves. Find thousands who are still missing. No evidence of their bodies was found among the wreckage of what had once been their homes, and ambulances took the injured to whatever hospital beds were available across the country, with some possibly being taken to larger facilities further afield for treatment. The posters show photos of the missing with calls to anyone with contact information for public squares from the city of Kahramanmaraş in downtown Hatay to cities all over Hatay.

Mehmet Golic says he spends his nights wandering the streets of Alexandretta, unable to sleep, haunted by his brother Mustafa. Since earthquakes destroyed Mustafa’s apartment when the neighboring building swept aside and crushed them both, killing at least 25 people, his family has accused Mohammed of guarding the rubble while his parents searched hospitals for any trace of his brother, promising a 24-year-old he intended to become. an architect.

“There are a lot of families in this situation, and a lot of people like me,” Mohammed said. Mehmet said, “Some people who came to rescue their relatives said, ‘We heard Mustafa’s voice, we pulled him out and sent him to a hospital in Adana.'” Istanbul in far north Turkey and stopping at every medical facility along the way to search for evidence of his missing son.

Mehmet Sekjan Gulik lost his 24-year-old brother, Mustafa, in the earthquake and could not find him. Photo: Rina Effendi/The Guardian

While his parents continue searching, Mohamed waits with other families in front of his brother’s building, mainly leaving to visit a local crisis center where he asks officials to move the rubble of Mustafa’s home. He described his frustration at being forced to pay private contractors to search the wreckage various times for missing persons, each time finding nothing. Muhammad’s plea to move the rubble becomes his primary obsession, and the only way he feels is he can help his missing brother. He said, “I’m going to stay here and see them clear the rubble again until I’m absolutely sure he’s not there.” “I’m 99% sure it doesn’t exist, but I want to be 100% sure.”

A DNA sample provided by the family in Adana yielded nothing, and officials told them the results had not yet appeared in the government system. “They told us it will take time,” said Mohammed, deeply frustrated with the official response to what many say is a widespread problem.

He said, “The DNA sample is to see if my brother is dead, but I think my brother is alive.” We’ve talked to people at all levels of government, even the mayor. But everyone says they can’t do anything at the moment.

The search for their father, mother and brother takes the days of Nur and Ertuğrul, as they return systematically to hospitals throughout the Southeast. They returned so often to Adana City Hospital, one of the largest in the region, that a month after the earthquakes, they became on friendly terms with the nurses in the large intensive care unit, who carefully photographed every unconscious person or identity cards of those brought in, thus making It allows siblings to scroll through the hospital’s temporary database of anonymous persons to see if they are able to identify their family members.

Nur remains baffled by why the Turkish authorities failed to create a missing persons database after the earthquakes, combining existing identity kits and routinely collected medical data with extensive property registration data to provide desperate families with a way to register their relatives as missing.

“Don’t we have enough Internet experts to do this?” she asked. “I searched for my family for more than 20 days and there is no information. There are people who stay in comas for five years. Will it take five years for us to find our missing families?”

The Ministry of Health needs to speed things up. My family could die somewhere out there, and I wouldn’t know. “

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