Türkiye
Almost a year after the earthquake: Erdoğan visits Hatay province
Two men warm themselves by a fire in the rubble of a destroyed house in Kahramanmaras. In the center of the city, countless houses were destroyed or damaged in the earthquake a year ago. photo
© Boris Roessler/dpa
Around 60,000 people died in the earthquake in Turkey and Syria a year ago. Some of the cleanup work continues to this day. Now Erdoğan is visiting one of the most affected places.
Almost a year after the devastating earthquakes in the Turkey, with tens of thousands of deaths, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited the worst-hit province of Hatay. “We still feel the pain of the lives we lost in the earthquake,” Erdoğan said at a ceremony to hand over newly built residential buildings to people whose houses collapsed in the quake.
Erdoğan said the government wants to hand over 200,000 of the 390,000 planned residential units by the end of the year. Around 75,000 of these are expected to be completed within the next two months. In the southeastern region of Turkey, more than 690,000 people still live in makeshift containers. According to the government, cleanup efforts after the quake are still ongoing in some areas.
On February 6, 2023, two earthquakes measuring 7.7 and 7.6 struck southeastern Turkey and parts of Syria. Around 60,000 people died, most of them in Turkey. Exact information about the victims from the civil war in Syria is difficult to determine. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, around 6,800 people died in the quakes across Syria.
Erdoğan and his government were initially harshly criticized after the quake. For example, they were accused of errors in crisis management. The focus also came on so-called black buildings that were built illegally and then later legalized by the government.