Rescuers in opposition-held areas have criticized the United Nations and the international community for their slow response after the earthquake.
UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths today appealed to the global community not to forget the thousands of people who need shelter and food as rescuers search for survivors of Monday’s earthquake that struck southern Turkey and the northwest Syria.
Speaking at a press briefing in Turkey’s Kahramanmaras province as rescue workers worked, Griffiths said he had spoken to families who have been displaced and left in the cold without food after the quake.
“I am here to make sure these people are not forgotten,” he told reporters.
Griffiths praised Turkey’s response to the disaster as “outstanding” and hailed the “courage of the rescuers who are working around the clock hoping for one more sound, one more survivor”.
“It’s the beginning and my experience is that people are always disappointed at the beginning,” he said in an apparent reference to criticism of the authorities’ response after the earthquake.
As he said, what happened in the area around the epicenter of the earthquake is “the worst event of the last 100 years in the region”.
He apparently meant the region’s worst natural disaster: Monday’s earthquake was the worst to hit Turkey since 1939.
Syria’s 11-year civil war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and left millions homeless, remains the region’s deadliest in recent history.
As Griffiths said, a three-month operation is being launched for both Turkey and Syria with the aim of helping cover the costs of operations there.
He told Reuters he hoped aid in Syria would be distributed to both government-held and opposition-held areas, but noted that at that level things were “not clear yet.”
Rescuers in opposition-held areas have criticized the United Nations and the international community for their slow response after the earthquake.
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