SO many people have perished in the earthquake in Turkey that rescuers have run out of graves, an aid worker has harrowingly revealed.
In an exclusive interview, Islamic Relief worker Salah Abulgasen told GB News: “You saw that remarkable footage of someone being recovered, we’re seeing unbelievable mass graves…there are not enough graves for the amount of bodies that are being recovered.
“It’s shocking, it is unbelievable. And these are the stories we’re hearing from some of my colleagues that are just 100 kilometres away from us.
“They’re talking to us about the fact that one of the urgent needs, believe it or not, is body bags, they haven’t got enough body bags for the number of bodies that they’re recovering.”
In a discussion with Mark Longhurst, he said: “It’s really a race against time, we’re doing our best, we’re doing whatever it is that we can.
“We’re here in the south of Turkey. In all honesty, it’s devastating. We’re hearing harrowing stories of individuals and the suffering that they’ve had to go through.
“It was two earthquakes. You can never really recover from the first and as soon as you think you’ve recovered, another one comes.
“And then there are after tremors and all the psychological effect and impact that that has on individuals.”
He said: “There’s lots of screaming, there’s lots of damage, we’re still unable completely to know the scale of the devastation.”
“It’s about search and rescue in this first critical 72 hours, we’re working as hard as we can.
“One of the challenges, as you can imagine, is that the roadblocks all around the roads and the access is very, very difficult to reach the epicentre.
“Now we’re finding there are fuel shortages, so some of the cranes and some of the tractors that we need that are so vital in such a time in order to clear that rubble, unfortunately, we’ve got fuel shortages.
“Consistently, there are electrical shortages, there are communication towers that have been sort of cut off at times. So it’s really desperate.
“We’re trying to get as many people as possible evacuated. Last night, it was really difficult, it was really cold.”
He added: “These are the coldest months of the coldest months of the year here in the south of Turkey and in the north of Syria.
“And what we’re finding, therefore, is that people obviously having lost their homes, having lost everything last night, we’re trying to put as many of them as possible into sort of emergency shelter, that may be local mosques, or schools or wherever it is that we could find, in order to be able to place them within
“We’re providing food, we’re doing medical assessments, there’s a lot going on, it’s extremely busy. It’s extremely challenging.”
Mr Abulgasen said: “Our message and our appeal to the international community is to support the aid efforts of organisations like Islamic Relief, and others that are working on the ground to help us and assist us and being able to help the people.
“These hours are critical. We’re working as hard as we can. The needs are vast, and we’re trying to do as much as we can and must also bring to people’s attention the severity of the matter.
“I mean, you know, you’re seeing on the news that the footage that you see does not by any means show the scale, you have to be here to see it, to feel it, to understand it, to talk to people, to hear their difficulties.”
