Yunus Emre Kaya and his fiancée, Gulcin, had been planning a life together before Monday’s earthquake shattered their dreams.
Two days later, Kaya was unzipping a black bodybag to identify her body in a sports hall in Kahramanmaraş where casualties from the disaster had been laid out. He gave her a last embrace, Reuters reports. They had been due to marry in April.
“I was planning to clothe her with a wedding dress but now I will clothe her with a funeral shroud,” he said.
The 24-year-old textile worker, who met Gulcin after he completed military service three years ago when she was 16, said her death had left him numb.
“Imagine somebody tied your hands and feet and you cannot get up. There is no food, no water, no air,” he said. “This is how I am. I am like the walking dead.”
Kaya was asleep at home when the quake struck, hitting his house “like an explosion” shortly after 4am on Monday.
He grabbed his mother and took her out into the street, before running for 10 minutes straight to Gulcin’s house.
He found her home in ruins. There were people in the rubble and screams from those trapped underneath. He later learned that Gulcin and her sister had died.
Two siblings, seven-month-old Omer and nine-year-old Muhammed Acar, are rescued in Adiyaman province, Turkey, 58 hours after the earthquake hit. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Agence France-Presse has a heartrending interview with a Syrian man, Malek Ibrahim, 40, who survived the quake with his wife and children in Idlib but has not heard from 30 relatives who are still unaccounted for elsewhere.
Malek has so far dug 10 family members from the rubble in Besnaya, a village 40km away in north-west Syria close to the Turkish border:
The whole family is gone. It’s complete genocide. Every time we recover a body, I remember the beautiful times that we spent together. We used to have fun and joke around, but never again... I will never see them again. We dig without sleep, hoping that someone may be alive. It’s a feeling I can’t describe, a tragedy.
Reuters has spoken to a Syrian medic who said the scale of the injuries from Monday’s earthquake was more devastating than from the country’s 11-year civil war. Mohamad Zitoun, a 34-year-old surgeon from Aleppo working in a hospital near the Turkish border, told the agency:
This is a huge calamity. I lived through shelling and survived massacres. This is totally different, terrifying and horrific. The first massive wave of patients surpassed the ability of any medical team. Cases arriving for treatment from shelling and aerial bombing would come one after the other, in small waves, but the earthquake has seen 500 victims brought in each day, requiring dozens of operations. Many of the injured die within an hour or two as a result of trauma shock, heart failure or bleeding, especially since the weather is cold and they would have been under the rubble for eleven or twelve hours.”
Turkish police have detained at least 18 people and arrested five after what were described as “provocative posts” on social media about Turkey’s earthquake, according to a tweet from the force.
Earlier, the NetBlocks internet monitoring service said Twitter was being restricted “on multiple internet providers in Turkey”, adding that Turkey had “an extensive history of social media restrictions during national emergencies and safety incidents”.
WHO sends aid and experts; UN says "put politics aside"
The World Health Organization is sending expert teams and special flights with medical supplies to Turkey and Syria, the director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has told a media briefing attended by Reuters.
The WHO will send a high-level delegation to coordinate its response as well as three flights with medical supplies, one of which is already on its way to Istanbul. “The health needs are tremendous,” Dr Iman Shankiti, the organisation’s representative for Syria said.
Separately, a leading United Nations official called on Syria’s government to facilitate aid access to rebel-held areas in the north-west, warning that relief stocks would soon be depleted.
“Put politics aside and let us do our humanitarian work,” the UN’s resident Syria coordinator El-Mostafa Benlamlih said in an interview with AFP, warning: “We can’t afford to wait and negotiate. By the time we negotiate, it’s done, it’s finished.”
Erdoğan condemns criticism, says Turkey death toll now 9,057
Speaking in Hatay province, close to the epicentre of the quakes, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said the number of people confirmed dead in Turkey had increased to 9,057, Reuters reports.
Syrian officials and a rescue group in rebel-held north-west Syria have said the death toll there has reached 2,662, bringing the combined tally to 11,719.
The president also condemned criticism of the government’s rescue effort, condemned by many in the country as slow and inadequate.
“This is a time for unity, solidarity. In a period like this, I cannot stomach people conducting negative campaigns for political interest,” Erdoğan said, adding that it was not possible to be prepared for such a disaster.
The EU has confirmed it will send €3.5m (£3.1m) in aid to Syria, currently subject to sanctions by the bloc, after Damascus officially requested assistance on Wednesday. The EU is also sending an initial €3m in aid to Turkey.
