“We want to find our children even if they are dead”: families in Türkiye

Seven weeks have passed since two earthquakes devastated southern Turkey and northern Syria and Orhan Kosker He hasn’t stopped looking for his nephews.

Ismet and Sirac, 13 and 9 years old, respectively, slept at home in the city of Gaziantep when the tragedy occurred.

The bodies of her parents and her sister, who died in the earthquake, were found nine days later and pulled from the rubble.

But there was no trace of the two children.

Gaziantep, in the southeast of Türkiye, it was one of 11 cities in that country that, on February 6, suffered widespread destruction.

In Türkiye alone, it is estimated that some 50,000 peoplewhile almost 6,000 lives were lost in northern and western Syria.

The financial cost of the disaster for Türkiye is estimated to amount to more than $100 billion.

help line

While tremendous efforts are being made to provide victims with help so they can have some sort of normality, there are still hundreds of families searching for their missing loved ones, hoping to find them dead or alive.

Witnesses told orhan that the building where his nephews were collapsed within a minute or two of the earthquake and that many people managed to escape.

Orhan was convinced that the children could have survived as well.

Since the earthquakes struck, nearly 2,000 children who were rescued from under the rubble have been registered with the authorities, according to official figures provided by the Ministry of Family and Social Affairs.

Nearly 200 of them have yet to be identified and reunited with their families.

The Turkish Ministry of Health created a helpline for earthquake victims and relatives of the missing.

Orhan said she called that line every day to check the list of newly identified children in case her nephews were on it.

His family has also provided DNA samples.

“We want to find our children even if they are dead. Even if we only find their bones, we will keep looking. God help us,” he said.

There is no official figure for the number of people missing in Turkey after the earthquakes. But it is believed that at least 1,400 bodies have yet to be identified.

missing for a month

For Abdulkudus Kazan, the search for his sister Hicran was harrowing.

Hicran Karadag, 44, was rescued from under the rubble of her apartment just hours after the quake.

She was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, but for the next month her family could not find out if she was alive or dead.

They searched for her in dozens of cities.

Finally they received the information that almost 1,000 victims had been buried in a cemetery in Narlica, on the outskirts of the city of Antioquia.

Common pit

Abdulkudus traveled to the newly built site: it was a mass grave.

Before the unidentified bodies were buried in the cemetery, Turkish authorities took photographs, collected DNA samples and took fingerprints.

Each unidentified victim had a number placed on their grave.

Abdulkudus went through some 1,500 photos looking for his sister. He even opened body bags and checked them to see if Hicran was there.

She shed tears of both relief and sadness when she learned that a DNA sample taken at the site matched a body that had been buried in that cemetery.

The death certificate showed that Hicran had lost his life as a result of cardiac arrest, after suffering head and body trauma.

It was not clear if he received any treatment at the hospital.

However, the certificate indicated that his body had been left out in the open for two days, in a parking lot of the field hospital that had been set up.

She was then buried without proper identification.

“It’s very difficult to search for your missing relative,” said her sister.

“You don’t know if he’s dead or alive, so you always have hope.”

“Even when the officials told me that the DNA samples matched, I still hoped that they might be wrong, that my sister might be alive.

Now I’m relieved that he has his own grave.”

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