Turkey-Syria earthquake: Death toll exceeds 24,000; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faces public fury

Turkey-Syria earthquake: There were more than 24,000 deaths from the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. On Friday, rescuers had begun removing children from the wreckage. Four days after the worst earthquake in the area in two decades struck, the verified death toll in southern Turkey and northwest Syria was at more than 24,000.

There was a lingering deathly stink in the air of Kahramanmaras, Turkey, the epicentre of the 7.8-magnitude quake that shook millions to their foundations on Monday morning.   In the meanwhile, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has claimed that the government could have responded more quickly to this week's massive earthquake. 

On Friday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan travelled to the region of Adiyaman, where he admitted that the government's reaction time was too slow.

"Although we have the largest search and rescue team in the world right now, it is a reality that search efforts are not as fast as we wanted them to be," he said.

On May 14, Turks will go to the polls to decide whether or not Erdogan should be re-elected, and his opponents have already started using his campaign as a political weapon. It's possible that the accident has caused the election to be delayed.

If elections are held, the catastrophe is likely to be a factor due to mounting frustration at the slow response time in delivering supplies and launching a rescue operation. Erdogan has called for unity and decried what he has termed as "negative campaigns for political interest" after the election proved to be the most difficult struggle he has faced in his two decades in office, and that was before the earthquake. The leader of Turkey's major opposition party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, has spoken out against the government's reaction.

"The earthquake was huge, but what was much bigger than the earthquake was the lack of coordination, lack of planning and incompetence," Kilicdaroglu said in a statement.
Leaders in both nations have been questioned about their reaction to the plight of hundreds of thousands of people who have been rendered homeless and are going hungry due to the harsh winter.

Teams of rescuers from dozens of nations worked around the clock to sift through the rubble of thousands of collapsed buildings in search of buried survivors. There were frequent calls for stillness as they listened for signs of life from the smashed concrete piles in subzero temps. As many as 870,000 people in Turkey and Syria need immediate access to hot meals, the United Nations has warned. As many as 5.3 million people in Syria may now be without a house.

"That is a huge number and comes to a population already suffering mass displacement," said Sivanka Dhanapala, the Syria representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. State media stated that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma visited an Aleppo hospital after making their first public appearance in afflicted regions since the earthquake.

Also, READ: Turkey-Syria Earthquake: India sends 841 cartons of medicines, protection safety tools under Operation Dost to Turkey

With this new policy, millions of people who have been waiting for relief throughout the country's 12-year civil conflict may get it more quickly.

The World Food Program had warned previously that it was running low on supplies in rebel-held northwest Syria due to the battle there making it difficult to deliver help, as reported by SMH.

(With inputs from ANI)