Six people died when two new earthquakes hit Turkey’s Hatay province, exactly two weeks after larger tremors devastated the region, killing nearly 45,000 people.
Rescue teams are searching for five people stuck under the rubble of newly collapsed buildings, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said in a live broadcast on Monday evening, after earthquakes measuring 6.4 and 5.8 struck just minutes away. As of Tuesday, six people have been confirmed dead and 6,254 injured.
Already homeless, families have taken refuge in tents bundled with children in cars, seeking safety. One family who recently returned to their second-floor apartment in Antakya told Haberturk News Channel that they had to flee again. Eyewitnesses in the city of Diyarbakir, located about 500 kilometers from Antakya, said that they experienced a violent earthquake.
“The 6.4-magnitude earthquake created a very large and destructive impact,” Ibrahim Guzel, the mayor of Defne town in Hatay, told the Türk expert.
He appealed for tents and rescue teams to help find survivors after buildings that were damaged two weeks ago collapsed in the latest earthquakes. “Out of a population of 166,500, half have already left. There are not enough municipal employees here,” he added, to meet people’s needs.
Toll from the start earthquakes The National Disaster Agency reported that on February 6, 41,156 people had reached Turkey. In Syria, nearly 4,000 people have died, according to the Associated Press. It had magnitudes of 7.8 and 7.5, according to the US Geological Survey.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Hatay earlier on Monday, promising to “rebuild it from scratch”. He said construction of nearly 200,000 new homes across the region would begin next month.
The initial quakes destroyed an estimated 345,000 homes in 10 provinces, home to about 13 million people.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Hatay over the weekend. “It’s hard to put it into words,” he said in Ankara on Monday. “Countless buildings, communities and streets damaged or completely destroyed.”
The United States pledged $185 million in humanitarian aid to Syria and Turkey.
Rescue work continued in Hatay and another province after the government ended efforts to search for survivors in the eight other districts affected by the February 6 earthquake, the worst natural disaster in modern Turkish history.
The Home Secretary warned people to stay away from their unsafe homes, adding that people were taking “extreme risk” by returning to collect their belongings.
Afad said more than 6,000 aftershocks have shaken the area since the earthquakes first hit.
Syria’s official news agency, Sana, said six people were injured in Aleppo in the recent earthquakes.