The earthquakes in Turkey and Syria leave more than 35,000 fatalities a week after the disaster

One week after the catastrophe, the balance of fatalities after the earthquakes It does not stop increasing in Turkey and Syria: at least 31,643 people have already died and 80,000 have been injured in Turkish territory, while the natural disaster leaves at least 3,575 dead in the neighboring country, according to the Turkish emergency agency.

However, and despite the passing of days, still people still alive among the rubble of the thousands of buildings that collapsed as a result of the earthquake and several more survivors have been rescued this Monday. This is the case of a 40-year-old woman who could have been found alive after 170 hours trapped among the remains of a house in the city of Gaziantep, while in Antakya, a man has also been found alive.

Almost miraculous rescues before which some experts have asked to have be careful when carrying out the removal work, both for the possibility of survivors and for not harming the bodies of the victims. Ahmet Ovgun Ercan, a prestigious geophysicist at Istanbul Technical University, has estimated on Twitter that there could still be 155,000 corpses in the rubble. For their part, the Turkish authorities have reported that some 158,000 people have been evacuated to other provinces.

In Syria, both the government and the rescue organization white helmets have stopped updating their casualty balances assiduously, but other sources they cite even higher casualty figuressuch as the so-called Government of Salvation, of the Islamist alliance Organismo de Liberación del Levante, which controls a good part of Idlib, the last opposition bastion of the country: it ensures that more victims have been registered in its areas alone than the White Helmets report for all rebel areas.

Why has it been so deadly?

The Turkish College of Architects attributes the huge number of fatalities to the breach of construction regulations and successive amnesties granted by the Government to buildings erected without a license. “The main reason for this enormous tragedy is the permission granted to buildings built without respecting construction regulations,” denounced Emin Koramaz, president of the Union of Chambers of Architects and Engineers of Turkey (TMMOB), in statements to the Efe agency. .

Koramaz assures that during the 20 years that the AKP, the party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been in government, there have been eight major legalizations of “unsafe, rotten and illegal” buildings and that they had been built and inhabited without the corresponding licenses.

Several Turkish media outlets recall, in turn, that during the campaign for the 2018 presidential elections, Erdogan -who is running for re-election next May- toured the areas most affected by the magnitude 7.7 and 7.6 earthquakes last monday ensuring that housing issues had been resolved of hundreds of thousands of citizens thanks to what he called “building peace”.