Reuters spoke to dozens of residents and overwhelmed first-responders who expressed bewilderment at a lack of water, food, medicine, body bags and cranes in the disaster zone.
"The general problem here is of organization, especially in the field of health," Onur Naci Karahanci, a doctor working in Turkey's southeastern city of Adiyaman, said on a call hosted by the Turkish Medical Association , the professional grouping for doctors. He said there weren't enough body bags for the dead, especially in the first two days after the quake.
AFAD has been tasked since 2009 with coordinating disaster response and aid efforts in Turkey by its 7,300 personnel and more than 600,000 volunteers, as well as by other Turkish and foreign groups. This included restricting the military's freedom to deploy its troops without direct instruction from civilian authorities, and sidelining of other first-responders, such as the Red Crescent and the AKUT search and rescue group, they said.
Having risen to prominence more than two decades ago partly due to his critique of the response to a major 1999 earthquake, Erdogan has rejected criticism of his own administration's response this month.Turkey's disaster response "extraordinary" given the quake's historic size. "In my experience people are always disappointed in the beginning," he said, in an apparent reference to criticism.
Referring to the report, Kemal Kilcdaroglu, leader of the main opposition party, said that even more damaging than the magnitude of last week's quake was the "lack of coordination, lack of planning and incompetence". AFAD's budget for 2023 was cut by a third to 8.08 billion lira , down from 12.16 billion lira in 2022. However, the budgets of the bodies it helps coordinate, including the police and coast guard, were boosted.Following a failed coup in 2016, Erdogan tightened his grip on economic, foreign and defence policy. The government arrested thousands of people and expelled tens of thousands more from state jobs for alleged links to the Gulen movement it accused of orchestrating the coup.
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