When a powerful earthquake struck southern Turkey last month, a lawyer concluded that her relatives had been buried in the rubble of their collapsed apartment. Three days later, rescue workers recovered the bodies of her mother and brother, she said, but days, then weeks, then a month passed with no sign of her father. His […]
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ADIYAMAN, Turkey — Beneath each fresh mound in this rapidly expanding graveyard lies a tragedy. One morning at dawn, Zeki Karababa told me about his. Karababa’s brother, Hamit; Hamit’s wife, Fatma; and two children, Ahmet, 10, and Evra, 3, had been crushed when their apartment building crumbled in the earthquake. But that was just the […]
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ISTANBUL — A coalition of parties seeking to unseat President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey anointed a veteran opposition politician on Monday as its presidential candidate just two months before elections that could drastically alter the country’s political and economic trajectory. The candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of Turkey’s largest opposition party, represents diverse political […]
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When a catastrophic earthquake struck Syria last month, President Bashar al-Assad did not declare a state of emergency nor a day of mourning for the victims. It was days before he visited the stricken areas. But from Day 1, his authoritarian government called for the lifting of Western sanctions. The United States initially pushed back, […]
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The dinner theater is now a day care center, where children rifle through boxes of donated toys. The beauty salon has turned into a one-man barbershop. On a recent afternoon, young boys raced across the wide decks that run the length of the Gemini, a cruise ship floating off the coast of southern Turkey. Families drank […]
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Ben Hubbard contributed reporting. The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, […]
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The scientists studying the powerful earthquakes that devastated parts of Turkey and Syria this month may bring new insights to a seismic zone that is strikingly similar: the San Andreas Fault in California. The earthquake zones have much in common, with one long, major fault and scores of smaller, secondary ones. Using ground-based and satellite […]
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A 5.2-magnitude earthquake struck southern Turkey on Monday, killing at least one person and trapping others in collapsed buildings three weeks after a devastating quake struck the same region, leaving more than 50,000 people dead in the country and in neighboring Syria. The latest quake struck just after noon on Monday, south of the city […]
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JINDIRES, Syria — She has no memory of the earthquake that broke her back and swallowed her daughters. Khaira Al Halbouni only knows what her husband told her afterward. In the middle of the night the building shook. He grabbed one daughter, Bisan, and their son, Ali. Take Mayas, their younger daughter, and run, he […]
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After powerful earthquakes struck southern Turkey, Eylem Sahutoglu and her family endured two weeks of freezing nights under a blue tarpaulin. Then word came from government engineers who had inspected their building: They could return home. But on Monday night, before they could move back into their house in Hatay Province, the earth began shaking […]
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ISTANBUL — Two dozen student volleyball players, four teachers and 12 parents visiting Turkey for a competition this month checked into the Grand Isias Hotel in the southern city of Adiyaman. When a powerful earthquake struck on Feb. 6, the building collapsed and killed dozens of people including everyone in the entourage except for four […]
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Taking a break from combing through the ruins of a powerful earthquake, Ahmet Aydanbekar rested in a courtyard in a salvaged blue armchair and thumbed through his phone to watch videos of past rescues. Shouts of “God is great” erupted from a video taken in southern Turkey when he helped pull out a 5-year-old girl […]
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ISTANBUL — We were late to the scene of the crime. Two days late. When the first earthquakes hit southern Turkey on Feb. 6, it took one full day of planning and one full day of travel before we reached the epicenter, Gaziantep. The flight from Istanbul usually takes about 90 minutes, but there was […]
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ISTANBUL — Just two weeks after the worst earthquake in more than 80 years devastated much of southern Turkey and northwestern Syria, another powerful temblor struck the same region on Monday, once again collapsing buildings and claiming lives, and sowing panic among millions of people already traumatized by disaster. The quake struck at 8:04 p.m. […]
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ANKARA — When Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken first planned a trip to Turkey, it promised to be a difficult, even contentious diplomatic visit. Washington and Ankara have been at odds on several important issues, including Turkey’s ties to Russia, its refusal to allow Sweden and Finland to join NATO and the authoritarian drift […]
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ADANA, Turkey — A powerful new earthquake shook southern Turkey and northwestern Syria on Monday evening, spreading panic among survivors two weeks after a powerful double tremor nearby destroyed more than 100,000 buildings, killed more than 46,000 people and left more than a million homeless. The 6.3-magnitude quake struck near the town of Uzunbag in […]
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Two weeks ago, Lutfiye Yuce hosted a 30th birthday party for her daughter Yesim in the southern Turkish city of Antakya. She bought an iced cake and invited a handful of neighbors. Three days later, the neighbors returned in the middle of the night to untangle Yesim from under her home, which had caved into the […]
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The body of Christian Atsu, a professional soccer player from Ghana whose career took him to England’s Premier League and the World Cup, has been recovered from the rubble in southern Turkey nearly two weeks after a powerful earthquake struck the country, his club and his agent said on Saturday. He was 31. “It is […]
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For miles around the small Turkish city of Erzin, the earth is shattered and buildings are razed, towns and cities turned into tombs of concrete by last week’s 7.8-magnitude earthquake. But Erzin still stands, an oasis of stability near the Mediterranean, where the question of why the city weathered the quake and a powerful aftershock […]
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Raja Abdulrahim contributed reporting. The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, […]
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A powerful earthquake last week catapulted Syria’s authoritarian president, Bashar al-Assad, into the global spotlight, creating an opportunity for him to inch further back onto the international stage through disaster diplomacy. As the death toll soared from the region’s deadliest quake in a century, Mr. al-Assad, long a pariah for bombing and torturing his own […]
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After her sister and her niece were trapped in the ruins of their apartment building during the earthquake that struck southern Turkey last week, Cigdem Ulgen rushed to the site to try to save them. She had no way to dig through the metal and concrete snarl that remained of the building in the hard-hit […]
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For about 200 hours, two Turkish brothers entombed under the rubble of a collapsed building in the earthquake-devastated city of Kahramanmaras held on, rationing bodybuilding supplements, drinking their own urine, swallowing gulps of air. “Breathing was easy,” one brother, Abdulbaki Yeninar, 21, told the local Ihlas news agency. “We took protein powder.” On Tuesday, rescue […]
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In the same city, the state news service Anadolu Agency broadcast the rescue of Aysegul Bayir, 35, live to a rapt Turkish audience. Viewers watched as rescue teams dug a five-meter tunnel through the ruins to reach her. In the same leveled town, Muharrem Polat, 32, and his wife, Hadiyet Polat, emerged from the rubble […]
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According to The Associated Press, a Turkish government agency has acknowledged that more than half of all buildings in the country don’t meet earthquake standards. L’Aquila, like Antakya, lies in a notorious earthquake zone. A quake in L’Aquila in 1349 killed 800 residents; another in 1703 killed more than 3,000, prompting Pope Clement XI to […]
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In a small cemetery toward the end of a dirt road that winds between snowy mountains in rural southern Turkey, a dozen new graves slant partway up the mountainside. Pine fronds and olive branches have been laid on top. At the head of each grave stands a cinder block tied with a scarf, a small […]
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Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, has agreed to the opening of two additional border crossings from Turkey into opposition-held territory in northwest Syria to allow the United Nations to deliver humanitarian relief to millions of earthquake victims, U.N. and Syrian officials said on Monday. The decision, which would let aid to flow for three months, was […]
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AL-ATARIB, Syria — For years, northwestern Syria has been home to millions of people displaced by war, so many that neighbor no longer knew neighbor. And so when an earthquake struck last week and homes were reduced to rubble, many couldn’t say with certainty who had been accounted for and who was still missing. Now, […]
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A week after a powerful earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, a severe shortage of tents, housing and medical supplies is imperiling relief efforts and posing new dangers to survivors, many of them injured or living outdoors in extreme cold. The death toll for both countries surpassed 35,000 on Monday, with more than one million people […]
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The upscale three-year-old housing complex of Asur in the Turkish city of Malatya, replete with chandeliers and marble floors, promised to be earthquake safe, built with the best materials to modern seismic codes. Residents in the middle-class neighborhood paid more for those assurances. One of the compound’s two buildings collapsed in the early hours of […]
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Finland offers a model of preparing politically for any disaster. During World War II, Finns suffered greatly as a result of being cut off from imports. Finns responded after the war by setting up a government commission that meets once a month, imagines everything that could go wrong and each month plans and prepares for […]
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