There are moments, during horrific natural disasters such as the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, when you can witness the best that mankind is capable of – the noble behavior that often emerges during a crisis.
Emergency personnel conduct a rescue operation to save a 16-year-old named Melda from the rubble of a collapsed building in Hatay, southern Turkey, on Feb. 9. The combined death toll has risen to over 23,000 for Turkey and Syria after the region’s strongest quake in nearly a century. Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images via TNS
A Greek search and rescue team and Turkish special operations police – whose members might have been fighting each other in wartime – worked side by side to rescue a small girl through a narrow gap in a pile of concrete that once was an apartment building near Antakya, Turkey. A group of Syrian White Helmets, scores of whom died rescuing civilians in Aleppo from the massive Syrian government bombings during the civil war, returned to extract a bloodied toddler from earthquake rubble in Azaz.
The endless Twitter videos of dramatic rescues move me to tears. But then anger sets in.
While an earthquake is an act of nature, it’s not too soon to ask what contribution three political leaders have made to the extent of the disaster. When it comes to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and Vladimir Putin, that contribution is enormous. Untold numbers of earthquake victims will die unnecessarily because of what these three have done – or refused to do.
As the earthquake death toll mounts, longtime Turkish journalist and Washington Post columnist Asli Aydintasbas contends that Turkey’s earthquake may be more than just a natural disaster. After a massive earthquake in 1999, she writes, the blame for many deaths “went to contractors who used cheap materials, officials who failed to enforce Turkey’s relatively loose building codes,” and “to a government that has failed to develop a nationwide earthquake response strategy.”
Erdoğan has favored friendly magnates from Turkey’s booming construction industry and disdained urban planners and environmentalists. Rules for earthquake-safe construction, finally passed in 2018, are ignored, with scant oversight.
No one should be surprised that many thousands of buildings crumbled immediately in earthquake-hit cities. Poorly built five-story apartment buildings pancaked into piles of concrete next door to damaged buildings that survived, perhaps because of older and better construction.
Aided by Erdoğan’s blind eye, corrupt builders using shoddy materials likely doomed Turkish citizens across the earthquake zone.
Meantime, across the border in Syria, the brutal Assad is directly responsible not only for much of the current Syrian death toll but also for the inability of international rescue teams to access the quake zone.
During Syria’s civil war, in which disaffected Syrians tried to overthrow the dictator, Assad’s planes bombed opposition and towns mercilessly, aided by the Russian air force of his ally, Vladimir Putin. Hospitals, schools and markets were targets of the Assad-Putin massacres from the air, in a preview of what Putin’s planes now do in Ukraine.
Millions of refugees from the bombings flooded into the cities and towns of northern Syria, which are now being hit hardest by the earthquake and have almost no access to aid.
Before the earthquake, Assad permitted aid to enter via only one border crossing terminal from Turkey. Now that terminal has been destroyed by the earthquake.
So, as Syrian survivors in Idlib wander aimlessly in the snow, there is no international aid – no medicine, no food and no help for the millions of desperate Syrians affected. International aid agencies have no way to reach them unless Assad opens more crossings.
As the earthquake casualties mount, one thing can be said for certain: Erdoğan, Assad and Putin are responsible for many of those deaths.
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