“I think I’ll hear one of these voices for the rest of my life,” a man in Turkey said, of listening for voices from the rubble after this week’s earthquake. “He said over and over, ‘I am here, don’t leave me, don’t leave me.’ But we had to leave him.”
When the first earthquake, 7.8 in magnitude, struck just outside Gaziantep on Monday morning, Gürkan Arpaci considered himself lucky. About eighty miles away, in Elbistan, the small Turkish town where Arpaci was born and lives, only three or four buildings had collapsed and there didn’t seem to be too many casualties. Almost everyone he knew appeared on the street in the freezing pre-dawn hour, wondering what to do next.
Eventually, after receiving limited responses, Arpaci’s father stopped calling his contacts in the central government. The two men instead started reaching out to friends in other cities, connections in the diaspora—the Arpacis are Kurdish Alevi, a minority within a minority—and the offices of opposition parties in Istanbul or in nearby cities. Their friends posted on social media, including Twitter, until the government appeared to temporarily restrict access to the platform.
Partly because of the significant Syrian population, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has a presence in the area; when the earthquakes hit, U.N. workers began distributing tents and food normally reserved for refugees. “It’s not possible to see who’s who,” Selin Unal, a U.N.H.C.R. spokesperson in Turkey, told me. “And from the Turkish-government side, there’s no difference when it comes to assisting them.
“The earthquake did not differentiate between the land of the Turkish Republic and the land of the Syrian Arab Republic. It claimed lives on both sides of the border,” Al-Droubi said. “If Turkey, with its greatness and strength, could not bear the burden of the earthquake on its own, then how can northern Syria, which is subjected to almost daily bombings?”
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