Live Updates: Rescuers Race Against Time After Earthquake Kills at Least 7,100 in Turkey and Syria

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From “New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

A powerful earthquake has killed thousands of people in Turkey and Syria and left dozens of cities in ruins. Today, Sabrina Tavernise speaks to witnesses on the ground, and my colleague Ben Hubbard reports from Istanbul.

It’s Tuesday, February 7.

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Ben Hubbard, you have been reporting on all this from Istanbul, where you are based for “The Times.” Tell us about exactly when and where these earthquakes occurred.

The first one struck early morning on Monday, February 6. It was between 4:00 and 5:00 AM. And it was quite cold in this area, so there was really no reason for anybody to be outside. Most people were at home sleeping. The second one happened the same day, but later on. This is early afternoon, sort of after lunchtime.

This is in Central Turkey in the south, near the border with Syria, and just sends out these massive, massive waves that ripple through a number of the neighboring countries but really hit this area of along the Syrian-Turkish border very, very hard.

And just how big were these earthquakes?

They were both big. The first one was a 7.8 magnitude. This is the first time in more than 80 years that Turkey had had an earthquake this big.

Wow.

The second one was slightly smaller — it was a 7.5 — but still enough to do serious damage.

So, Ben, walk us through that serious damage that these two earthquakes have inflicted. And I should say it’s late Monday evening where you are. It’s early afternoon here in the US on the East Coast. So things may change. But at this point, what do we know? And I wonder if we can start with Turkey and the impact there.

So the epicenter of this earthquake was near the city of Gaziantep, and it just rippled out from there. The death toll, as it stands now, is somewhere around 1,650 people. Many more people than that wounded. Lots and lots of people still missing. And we’ve moved on to the rescue stage now, where work crews are going through a lot of these sites to try to see if they can hear voices, see if they can find anybody who’s still alive and get them out, and also, of course, trying to find bodies and bring them to their loved ones.

How many cities and towns in Turkey have been affected, and what kind of square footage or mileage has been affected?

We were talking about four or five major cities and then many, many smaller towns scattered over a stretch of more than 250 miles. So we’re talking about a huge, huge swath of territory.

Wow.

Some rural areas were decimated. Other cities that were quite a ways away also had just large buildings come down into big piles of rubble. There are these baffling videos where you’ll have one building that’s just completely come down like a house of cards and is surrounded by other buildings that look very similar that don’t appear to have much damage. And there is an almost random quality to the destruction, and I think for people who are living in this area, there’s a random quality to who ended up losing loved ones and who ended up surviving.

Right. Ben, just pulling back a moment, what should we understand about this moment in Turkey to put these earthquakes and all that damage you just described into a larger context?

So these hit Turkey, I think, in a difficult time and, also, in a difficult place. And so, in terms of time, we’re talking about the country has been dealing with very, very strong inflation. Inflation reached 80 percent late last year, which is about 10 times what it was in the United States when everyone was very worried about inflation there. So —

Extraordinary.

— this has really eroded family budgets. It’s made it very, very hard for people to buy the kinds of things that they’re used to buying. Prices have really been off the charts. So there was a lot of tension in the air politically before this came across. And then, in terms of the location, this is very close to the border with Syria, where you’ve had this terrible, terrible civil war that’s been going on for more than a decade now.

You have 3.6 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, many of them living in this area, many of them living in very, very impoverished conditions, very, very difficult conditions, very vulnerable to any kind of a shock just to people who don’t have a lot of resources to recover when something like an earthquake comes along and destroys their homes or destroys their cars, or shops, or whatever other resources they have.

Well, Ben, you’re starting to do what I would like to do now, which is to turn to what this earthquake has looked like in Syria, which, as you’ve said, has been in the middle of this deadly civil war. So, before we turn to that larger context in Syria, let’s first understand what the damage has looked like from these two earthquakes in the country so far.

So I think the difference between Turkey and Syria, Turkey has a functional state. It’s a place that knows that they’re at a tremendous earthquake risk. The government has put in lots of regulations about how buildings are supposed to be built to protect against these things. And that doesn’t mean they’re always followed, but the regulations are there, and there is a state to enforce them.

These areas in Syria are exactly the opposite. These are places that are very poorly governed. Some of them are under control of the government of Bashar al-Assad, which has become very, very weak over the years through this decade of civil war that they’ve been fighting and the fact that much of the world considers him a pariah and doesn’t want to do anything to help out his government. Other parts of this territory are run by antigovernment rebels, who do their best to govern in these areas with very, very few resources.

You also have close to 3 million people from elsewhere in Syria who have fled fighting who have ended up in this area, people who probably thought that they were going to be able to get out of Syria, go to Turkey, perhaps get to Europe, and just basically got stuck. So this is an area that is incredibly poor, has very poor governance, and it’s safe to say that they don’t think a lot about building codes. Lots of these people live in very hastily built either shelters, sometimes unfinished apartment building, sometimes poorly built apartment buildings, and so they were just much, much more vulnerable to something like an earthquake when it came through this area.

So what does the recovery look like for both of these countries, Ben? Because, as you’re hinting at, these are two very different places with two very different governments that have two very different relationships with the rest of the world, including countries like the US.

On one hand, it’s been quite remarkable to see how many countries have stepped forward and offered aid, offered to send in their own trained rescue crews to come join the operation. But almost all of these offers have been made to Turkey. There have been very few that I’ve seen of people actually offering aid to Syria and to its recovery for this. Part of that is just because of the respective governments involved. Most governments in the world have quite a good relationship with Turkey. It’s a member of NATO, whereas Syria has just become a very complicated place. People don’t like Bashar al-Assad for the most part. Most people consider him a war criminal and don’t really want to help him after the way that he’s waged this civil war in his country. And then the other parts of this territory that are run by the rebels, people have a hard time with them too.

There have been problems with jihadist organizations working around their areas, and so funders are very nervous about putting any funding in. And all this is just going to make it that much harder for the normal people who have ended up in these areas and just happen to be living in this situation to get the kind of aid that they’ll need to recover from this.

So, through no fault of their own, the people in the parts of Syria that need the most help are quite likely not to get it or get it very quickly because of the war.

Yes, I think that’s true. And I think it’s probably going to be much harder for the people in Syria who, in many ways, have the least resources to bounce back from something like this.

So, Ben, I’m curious, as someone who has spent a fair amount of time in both of these countries, how you’re thinking about this natural disaster and the way fate brought it to these two countries.

First is just a tremendous amount of sadness. I mean, these are parts of the world that have plenty of struggles of their own. But to get hit by something like this, it’s a fate that you wouldn’t want to wish on any society. I mean, this is an earthquake of biblical scale that you read about in the Old Testament.

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It’s been very difficult to watch. I mean, these are areas that I’ve traveled in very frequently, where I’ve done a lot of interviews through the course of the war and the various responses to the war. And this is just another blow to a place that’s really dealt with a lot. And you just hope that there’s a way that they can pull out of it or that there can be some kind of a real recovery.

Well, Ben, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thank you.

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We’ll be right back.

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Here’s what else you need to know today. On Monday, a top American commander said that the military had failed to detect previous Chinese spy balloons that had entered US airspace before last week, an intelligence failure that he said must be fixed. The admission from the leader of the North American Aerospace Command, Glen VanHerck, highlights America’s vulnerability to Chinese incursions, which have occurred at least five times in recent years.

And Russian forces attacked dozens of Ukrainian positions across the war’s eastern front on Monday in what Ukrainian officials said could be the start of the largest Russian offensive since the war’s earliest days. Russia appears determined to break through Ukraine’s defensive lines before the one-year anniversary of its invasion on February 24 and, according to Ukrainian officials, has dispatched tens of thousands of soldiers to eastern Ukraine in an attempt to accomplish that goal.

Today’s episode was produced by Rachel Quester, Carlos Prieto, Mooj Zadie, Diana Nguyen, and Clare Toeniskoetter. It was edited by Lisa Chow and MJ Davis Lin, contains original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

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That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.