Turkey resorts to mass burials after massive earthquake
- At least 21,000 people dead in Turkey and Syria in one of the region’s worst disasters for a century
- Mass burials held in the hard-hit southern Turkish city of Kahramanmaras, near the quake’s epicentre
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Turkey-Syria earthquake: Mass burials held as death toll continues to rise
There is an almost assembly-line quality to the burials in this southern Turkish city near the epicentre of one of the world’s deadliest natural disasters in years.
The exigencies of mass death have left little other choice since Monday’s magnitude-7.8 earthquake transformed the area into a charnel house of mangled bodies and crushed masonry.
And so, with every day as the death count climbs higher – on Thursday, it leapt past the 21,000 threshold across southern Turkey and northern Syria – excavators lumber like ungainly beasts across the pine-forest cemetery on Kahramanmaras’ outskirts, scooping out 60-metre-long trenches to receive victims.
Every metre of trench was claimed as soon as it was turned over. The digger would barely lift its bucket before survivors would appear, chanting “La ilaha illa Allah” (There is no god but Allah) as they lifted yet another body bag and heaved it into the fresh opening.
A harried-looking imam stood by the side, intoning a quick, half-minute-long collection of Koranic verses before briskly moving along the trench to the next grave in line, leaving family members to finish the grim work of constructing a canopy of wooden slats placed width-wise over the corpse.
Then the excavator covered the trench with earth; no headstone, but a piece of wood hewed from one of the nearby pines with a name and date scribbled with black marker.