Earthquake, the photo of the rescued little girl that moves the world: over 3600 dead

LThe photo of the Syrian girl in the arms of her rescuer is moving the world.

The little girl was pulled from the rubble of a building destroyed by the earthquake that devastated Turkey and Syria. She was photographed in the arms of a rescuer while wearing her blood-stained white cotton pajamas.

With blankets also covering the injured parents, rescuers tried to move safely through the rubble of the collapsed building.

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Meanwhile, the number of victims continues to rise: it currently stands at 3.613. Turkish authorities have reported that 2.316 people lost their lives in the 7.8 magnitude earthquake. In Syria, the number has risen to nearly 1.300, according to the Ministry of Health and rescue workers.

But there are still hundreds of missing and at the moment there are over 11 thousand injured, many of them in serious conditions. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has declared 7 days of national mourning and schools across the country will remain closed until February 13.

 The most disastrous earthquake since 1938

Two earthquakes, four tremors ranging in magnitude from 6,4 to 7,7 shook ten different cities in what Erdogan called “the most disastrous earthquake since 1938”. An earthquake that immediately entered the sinister ranking of the 10 most lethal earthquakes that have hit Turkey since 1930.

The country is crossed by two faults, the Anatolian and the African, to the north and south, generated by the split of the Arabian plate that coincides with the south-east of the country. Hatay, Gaziantep, Kilis, Urfa, Adiyaman, Osmaniye, Malatya, Kahramanmaras, Adana, Diyarbakir are the main cities that today count the dead and are faced with the bill of damages and thousands of buildings already demolished because they are on the verge of collapse.

 Two strong earthquakes

The rescue machine was immediately activated, very well organized in Turkey with the civil protection AFAD unfortunately not new to this type of intervention. Afad itself reported that the first shock, of magnitude 7,7, struck at 4:17 in the morning (Rome +2), epicenter in Pazarcik, in the province of Kahramanmaras, at a depth of 7 km.

The second tremor hit Gaziantep a few minutes later, magnitude 6,4, followed by a third earthquake of 6.5. A tremor of 7.5 shook the province of Kahramanmaras again 7 hours later, the peak of a seismic swarm that recorded more than 150 tremors. Tremors felt in Iraq, Lebanon, Cyprus and Egypt and that in Syria have caused at least a thousand deaths. Erdogan arrived on a flight from Istanbul at the headquarters of the presidency of Afad, where he took over the coordination of the operations.

The last earthquake response in a densely populated area was in Izmir in 2021. The Aegean coastal city was hit by a earthquake of 6,6 degree that caused 117 victims. This time, however, Turkey is facing a catastrophe of much greater magnitude and the highly organized machine of the Afad, which has extracted more than 6 thousand people today, may not be enough.

Erdogan specified that he had received offers of help from 45 countries outside of NATO and the European Union. Germany was the first to offer help, but Greece's eternal friends-enemies were not missing from the roll call, as well as a phone call from French President Emmanuel Macron, whose relations with Erdogan are often problematic, and from Israeli President Isaac Herzog, with whom Erdogan instead mended fences during 2022.

 Phone calls to Erdogan also from Zelensky and Putin

Above all, however, there was no shortage of phone calls from Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. It is inevitable that a certain coordination will take place between Russia and Türkiye.

The earthquake has in fact generated a catastrophe that concerns the border between Syria and Turkey, the same area regarding which Erdogan and Putin have reached several agreements in recent years, a territory in which there are two enclaves under the control of Ankara.

The Turkish Red Cross also runs refugee camps and hospitals in Syria's northwestern province of Idlib. Moscow has been essential to the Damascus regime's survival for years and has already sent relief and aid teams to Syria, and the Russian response will likely be coordinated with Turkey's.