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From our special correspondents in Atalar – More than 72 hours after the catastrophic quakes that ravaged southern Turkey, residents of Atalar, a mountainous village west of Gaziantep, are still waiting for aid to reach them, with only their cars to shelter them from the bitter cold.
“We have nowhere to go. It’s cold. We are freezing.” Shivering in a puffer jacket, a shawl wrapped around her head, a woman sits on a pile of a gravel, quietly sobbing. The mountain of rubble at her feet points to where her home once stood.
Like so many others here in Atalar, the woman and her family have been left homeless since the deadly earthquakes that ravaged southern Turkey and neighbouring Syria before dawn on Monday.
>> Live: Death toll from Turkey, Syria earthquakes tops 16,000
“We’re out in the cold with our four children, we have nothing left,” she says. Her village lies roughly 30 kilometres from the city of Gaziantep, where the first makeshift tents are being set up for the homeless. But here there are none.
“We have no news of our relatives, everyone is dead,” the woman cries, her voice choked with emotion. “God help Turkey and its people. I have no words. God, help us!”
‘The government has done nothing’
In this mountainous farmers’ village, the violence of the tremors literally ripped apart the frail buildings made of cinder blocks. In the ascending alleys covered in icy snow, the gutted homes expose the intimacy of those who lived there: bedrooms wide open, furniture splintered on the floor, clothes scattered about, and animals roaming amid the desolation.
Here and there, residents comb through the debris, trying to recover what they can. Women sort through broken dishware, sometimes letting out an anguished moan, their faces a portrait of…
Source : france24
