International

Turkey-Syria quake: Two-month-old baby among those rescued as death toll rises to 25,000

Published

1 year ago

February 12, 2023

Rescuers pulled a two-month-old baby and an elderly woman from the rubble on Saturday, five days after an earthquake devastated Turkey and Syria, leaving more than 25,000 dead.

Tens of thousands of local and international rescue workers are still scouring through flattened neighbourhoods despite freezing weather that has compounded the misery of millions now in desperate need of aid.

However, Austrian soldiers and German rescue workers called off their searches for several hours in southern Hatay, citing a difficult security situation and clashes between local groups.

In the midst of destruction and despair, miraculous tales of survival continue to emerge.

“Is the world there?” asked 70-year-old Menekse Tabak as she was pulled out from the concrete in the southern city of Kahramanmaras — the epicentre of Monday’s 7.8-magnitude tremor — to applause and cries praising God, according to a video on state broadcaster TRT Haber.

In the city of Antakya, a two-month-old baby was found alive 128 hours after the quake, state news agency Anadolu reported.

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A two-year-old girl, a six-month pregnant woman, plus a four-year-old and her father, were among those rescued five days after the quake, Turkish media reported.

In southern Turkey, families clutched each other in grief at a cotton field transformed into a cemetery, with an endless stream of bodies arriving for swift burial.

Compounding the anguish, the United Nations has warned that at least 870,000 people urgently need hot meals across Turkey and Syria. In Syria alone, up to 5.3 million people may have been made homeless.

A border crossing between Armenia and Turkey opened for the first time in 35 years on Saturday to allow five trucks carrying food and water into the quake-hit region.

– ‘Clashes between groups’ –
Turkey’s disaster agency said over 32,000 people from Turkish organisations are working on search and rescue efforts. In addition, there are 8,294 international rescuers.

However, Austrian soldiers on Saturday suspended rescue operations in Hatay over a “worsening security situation”, an army spokesman told AFP. Two dog handlers later resumed work under protection from the Turkish army.

A similar decision to halt rescue operations was taken in Germany by the Federal Agency for Technical Relief (TSW) and an NGO specialising in helping victims of natural disasters, ISAR Germany, according to an NGO spokesman.

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“There are more and more reports of clashes between different factions, shots have also been fired,” said ISAR spokesman Stefan Heine.

The UN rights office had on Friday urged all actors in the affected area — where Kurdish militants and Syrian rebels operate — to allow humanitarian access.

The outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which is considered a terrorist group by Ankara and its Western allies, announced a temporary halt in fighting to ease recovery work.

Medical Aid For Aleppo

In Syria, where years of conflict have ravaged the healthcare system and parts of the country remain under the control of rebels, aid has been slow to arrive.

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus took a flight full of emergency medical equipment into the quake-stricken city of Aleppo on Saturday.

Tedros toured damaged areas of the city tweeting: “I’m heartbroken to see the conditions survivors are facing — freezing weather and extremely limited access to shelter, food, water, heat and medical care”.

The Syrian government said it had approved the delivery of humanitarian assistance to quake-hit areas outside its control in Idlib province. A convoy was expected to leave on Sunday.

In Damascus, Suleiman Khalil, an official at the transport ministry, said 57 aid planes had landed at Syrian airports this week.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has urged the Security Council to authorise the opening of new cross-border aid points between Turkey and Syria. The council will meet to discuss Syria, possibly early next week.

Turkey said it was working on opening two new routes into rebel-held parts of Syria.

The winter freeze has left thousands of people either spending nights in their cars or huddling around makeshift fires that have become ubiquitous across the quake-hit region.

– Anger builds –
In Turkey, five days of grief and anguish have been slowly building into rage at the poor quality of buildings as well as the government’s response to the country’s worst disaster in nearly a century.

Officials in the country say 12,141 buildings were either destroyed or seriously damaged in the earthquake.

“Damage was to be expected, but not the type of damage that you are seeing now”, said Mustafa Erdik, a professor at Istanbul-based Bogazici University.

Turkish police on Saturday detained 12 people, including contractors, over collapsed buildings in the southeastern provinces of Gaziantep and Sanliurfa, local media reported.

Officials and medics said 22,327 people had died in Turkey and 3,553 in Syria. The confirmed total now stands at 25,880.

Related Topics:Death toll quake Turkey-Syria

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International

Dam collapses, death toll rises in Brazil floods

Published

8 hours ago

May 3, 2024

Trends Admin

The municipality of Encantado has turned into a river, as residents have been desperately trying to move to higher ground (Reuters)

Dam collapses, death toll rises in Brazil floods

A hydroelectric dam has collapsed in southern Brazil after days of heavy rains that triggered massive flooding, killing more than 30 people.

Officials say another 60 people are missing in Rio Grande do Sul state.

About 15,000 residents have fled their homes since Saturday. At least 500,000 people are without power and clean water across the state.

The burst dam triggered a two-metre (6.6ft) wave, causing panic and further damage in the already flooded areas.

The dam is located between the municipality of Cotiporã and the city of Bento Gonçalves.

The extreme weather has been caused by a rare combination of hotter than average temperatures, high humidity and strong winds.

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Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has visited the region, promising help from the central government.

Earlier, state Governor Eduardo Leite pleaded for urgent assistance, saying that “we need to rescue hundreds of people in dozens of municipalities”.

Helicopters have been deployed to search for stranded people.

In some areas, the flooding is so severe that helicopters have been unable to land and have had to winch residents to safety.

In the Candelária municipality, residents took to the roofs of their homes as their houses filled with water.

Meteorologists have predicted further rains to fall in the region as a cold front moves across it.

Last year, more than 30 people were killed in a cyclone in Rio Grande do Sul.

Brazil’s National Institute of Meteorology attributed the increased intensity and frequency of rainfall to the climate phenomenon El Niño.

Dam collapses, death toll rises in Brazil floods

BBC

International

US students slam Biden’s comments on Gaza encampments

Published

8 hours ago

May 3, 2024

Trends Admin

U.S. President Joe Biden

US students slam Biden’s comments on Gaza encampments

President Joe Biden says “order must prevail” on university campuses in the United States, just hours after police raided and dismantled another protest encampment in support of Palestinians.

In a brief news conference on Thursday, Biden said both the right to free speech and the rule of law “must be upheld” but stressed that “violent protest is not protected”.

“Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduation — none of this is a peaceful protest. Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not a peaceful protest,” he said.

“Dissent is essential to democracy, but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education,” Biden continued. “There’s a right to protest but not the right to cause chaos.”

Biden’s comments came shortly after police arrested at least 132 student protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), early on Thursday and cleared out an encampment.

UCLA is among the dozens of US universities where students have set up camps over the past few weeks to demand an end to Israel’s war in Gaza. Many are also calling for their schools to divest from any firms complicit in Israeli abuses.

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The protests have been met with a fierce backlash from university administrators, as well as pro-Israel lawmakers and groups.

On Thursday, students and other observers quickly slammed Biden’s statement as failing to recognise that US colleges and universities have called heavily armed police forces onto their campuses to disperse non-violent demonstrations.

The recent arrests of students and faculty at UCLA and New York’s Columbia University, among other campuses, have drawn widespread condemnation.

But in his brief address, Biden did not comment on university policies or the use of force by police. Nor did he remark on reports that pro-Israel demonstrators had attacked pro-Palestinian demonstrators at the UCLA encampment this week.

Instead, he said there is no place on college campuses for “anti-Semitism or threats of violence against Jewish students”. Student demonstrators, however, have rejected accusations that their encampments are anti-Semitic or pose a threat.

“There’s a [sense of] disappointment, but there’s no surprise,” Kali, a student protester at George Washington University in Washington, DC, said of Biden’s remarks.

“For the Biden administration to demonise us in this way is honestly incredibly disappointing,” Kali told Al Jazeera. “It paints a target on the backs of Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, anti-Zionist youth.”

Political blowback

Biden has faced months of widespread anger and mass protests over his unwavering support for Israel during the Gaza war.

More than 34,500 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since early October. The besieged enclave faces a dire humanitarian crisis, and the top United Nations court said the war has spurred a plausible risk of genocide.

The US president, who is seeking re-election in November, also faces growing disapproval among young voters.

Biden’s approval rating stands at 28 percent among voters under age 30, according to a Pew Research Center survey released last week.

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A recent CNN poll also showed that a staggering 81 percent of voters younger than 35 disapprove of Biden’s handling of Israel’s war on Gaza.

The Democratic president’s support for Israel, condemnation of the student protests, and silence on the mass arrests and violence against demonstrators may fuel young people’s apathy — if not antipathy — towards him, experts said.

“The Democrats can’t really afford to give people more reasons to vote against Biden, and this actually becomes one,” Omar Wasow, assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, told Al Jazeera.

‘Losing an entire generation’

Experts say young voters could be key to Biden’s prospects in November, as he faces a likely rematch against his 2020 rival, Republican Donald Trump.

In a close race, as the November election is expected to be, low turnout could spell trouble for the Democratic incumbent.

Hasan Pyarali — the Muslim Caucus chairperson for College Democrats of America, the university arm of the Democratic Party — told Al Jazeera he was disappointed by Biden’s comments on Thursday.

“In our point of view, it’s not just good policy to oppose the genocide; it’s good politics. He has done neither, and we’re really disappointed to see that,” said Pyarali, a senior at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

He added that it was especially disheartening to hear Biden say he would not reconsider his Middle East policy as a result of the student protests.

“We’re here to make it known that if he doesn’t change course, there’s a real risk that we [Democrats] lose 2024,” Pyarali said.

He also said the prospect of Trump winning in November would not be enough to convince young voters to vote for Biden. “It’s not on us to make sure that Trump doesn’t come back; it’s on Biden and his campaign,” he said.

“It’s now on him to go forward. If he wants to continue down the path that is unpopular, unjust and genocidal, he certainly can — he’s the president of the United States. But it’s at the peril of essentially losing an entire generation of voters and also risking the 2024 election.”

US students slam Biden’s comments on Gaza encampments

Al Jazeera

International

Gaza: Police arrest 2,000 pro-Palestine protesters on US campuses

Published

8 hours ago

May 3, 2024

Trends Admin

Gaza: Police arrest 2,000 pro-Palestine protesters on US campuses

Police have arrested more than 2,000 people during pro-Palestinian protests at college campuses across the United States in recent weeks, according to an Associated Press tally Thursday.

Demonstrations – and arrests – have occurred in almost every corner of the nation. But in the last 24 hours, they’ve drawn the most attention at the University of California, Los Angeles, where chaotic scenes played out early Thursday when officers in riot gear surged against a crowd of demonstrators.

Hundreds of protesters at UCLA defied orders to leave, some forming human chains as police fired flash-bangs to break up the crowds.

At least 200 people were arrested, said Sgt. Alejandro Rubio of the California Highway Patrol, citing data from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Rubio said they were being booked at the county jails complex near downtown Los Angeles. UCLA police will determine what charges to bring.

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Later Thursday morning, workers removed barricades and dismantled the protesters’ fortified encampment. Bulldozers scooped up bags of trash and tents. Some buildings were covered in graffiti.

Tent encampments of protesters calling on universities to stop doing business with Israel or companies they say support the war in Gaza have spread across campuses nationwide in a student movement unlike any other this century.

The demonstrations began at Columbia University on April 17, with students calling for an end to the Israel-Hamas war, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the Health Ministry there. Israel launched its offensive in Gaza after Hamas killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages in an attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7.