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Irmak is just one of a horrifyingly large number of people killed by Monday’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake, which has devastated large swaths of Turkey and neighboring Syria.
More than 20,000 people are known to have died, according to tallies from the Associated Press on Thursday, making the disaster one of the deadliest of the last decade.
There are few more traumatized corners of the globe that the quake could have struck than Syria’s northwest.
That country, plagued for more than a decade by a civil war that has wrought devastation and triggered a global refugee crisis, already had 15 million people in need of humanitarian aid even before the tremor began, according to David Miliband, president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee.
“One of the deadliest earthquakes this century, followed by hundreds of aftershocks, now adds to a litany of devastation,” Miliband said in a statement shared with BuzzFeed News, calling for aid to begin “skyrocketing” in order to meet the desperate need.
On Thursday, three days after the quake, the first convoy of aid trucks finally reached the opposition-held Idlib area in Syria’s northwest. The trucks arrived via the only crossing with the Turkish border that the United Nations has authorized for use but that had been blocked for days by damage.
However, the White Helmets, a humanitarian group that assists in the region, said the aid was merely the same supplies that had preceded the disaster. “It is not special aid and equipment for the search and rescue teams, and the recovery of those trapped under the rubble,” the group said on Twitter. “We are disappointed at a time when we are desperate for equipment that will help us save lives from under the rubble.”
Almost 2,000 people have died in the region, according to the White Helmets. Many of the dead had fled destruction and violence elsewhere in Syria only to lose their lives when buildings collapsed there.
