ANTAKYA, Turkey — For six days, Haya Jilkhi kept sending jumbled text messages to her family and friends from under the rubble, to her father and brother who escaped, to her sister in Saudi Arabia, to her girlfriends in Istanbul and Latakia.
The historic city of Antakya was one of the places most ravaged by an earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on Feb. 6. But many residents said they were left to dig out themselves and their families on their own. Adding to their misery was another earthquake late Monday, with an uncertain toll, measured at 6.4 magnitude along the Turkish-Syrian border.
The Turkish city is the largest in the southern Hatay province. It was once filled with modern buildings, though part of the city rests on the site of an eponymous ancient city that is still a place of pilgrimage for Christians.
Antakya residents expressed anger and frustration at delayed rescue efforts that cost many their lives. Some said civil defense workers did not arrive until later in the afternoon of the earthquake. Others said it took them days to show up. They said they came in scant numbers that were nowhere near enough to comb through the city’s endless rows of destroyed buildings in search of survivors, residents interviewed for this story told The Washington Post.
The anger in Antakya echoed complaints from other hard-hit provinces, where residents said they were left on their own for at least two days after the earthquakes, without professional rescue teams or heavy machinery to move rubble, as hope for finding survivors faded.
Jilkhi’s uncle Omar Barakat said he could only get himself and his wife out the first day, some 13 hours after the earthquake hit. He found his two children the next day, rescued by civilians who had heard them. One of his daughters, a 5-year-old, died under the rubble. The Syrian father wanted to bury her in his home country, so he kept her body with him for three days as he camped outside in the cold, in hopes that the border would open. He buried her nearby, losing patience over waiting for the bureaucracy to open a crossing into Syria.
Jilkhi’s brother Osama said they watched an influential man from their building arrive with a big team to retrieve his dead. He told the family he would take care of the bodies in that building and asked them to stand back. But once he removed his own kin’s bodies, the team packed up and left, Jilkhi said. “He took his family and left,” he said angrily.
As he spoke last Tuesday, he stared at the handful of rescue team members in front of him, growing impatient at their slow pace, waiting for any sign of his two siblings or his mother, who had come to Antakya days before the earthquake on a visit from Dubai.
The group of men, relatives and friends, who had gathered in front of the collapsed building said their anger was not directed at the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but at the ineffective local government, particularly the mayor of Hatay province.
“It’s a new building,” he said. “It’s two and a half years old. And it collapsed on itself like flour? Where is the structure? This means you’re trading with people’s lives,” Barakat said, adding angrily that the mayor “keeps coming and filming with his phone,” while the family stands waiting for its dead.
“We had hope that they were alive. It’s been 10 days, and we no longer have hope,” he said. “But we want their corpses to bury them. They’re not helping us to take out the bodies, and they’re not letting us dig ourselves.”
Jilkhi’s brother Osama pointed out the opening to their house, where you can catch a glimpse into their living room. “You can smell the stench of death coming from inside, it’s overpowering,” he said. “We know our family is dead. They won’t let us take them out.”
He said he kept calling national disaster agency AFAD, which eventually sent two people “in clean clothes” with no equipment. “They come, film, take selfies and leave.”
“I thought they were rescue teams: Where is the rescue? Where are the people, where is the equipment?”
His sister was alive, he said. “Now it’s over.”
Upon calling Hatay’s mayoral office, the official who answered was in tears and deferred questions to the Interior Ministry. The interior minister’s press office told The Post that teams were dispatched to the 10 affected cities, and although all resources were exhausted, the area was so large that “we couldn’t reach everywhere.”
The earthquake did not spare government buildings or equipment, the press office said, adding that rescue teams, doctors and firefighters themselves became earthquake victims. Damage to the roads and highway leading into the city also posed another challenge for rescue teams trying to reach the area.
“The search and rescue plan for Hatay province is that, if an earthquake happens in that province we will use nearby provinces — Adana, Kahramanmaras and Gaziantep — as a base and send rescue teams, equipment and aid from these cities,” the press office said. “But because those cities were also affected by the earthquake, we had to mobilize teams from secondary cities.”
Vehicles across Antakya bore the names of the cities from which they hailed: Bodrum’s municipal police; firefighter trucks from Denizli and Ankara; funeral transport vehicles from Amasya and Disli. The Interior Ministry said between Feb. 6, the day the earthquake hit, and Feb. 18, over 13,000 personnel were dispatched to Hatay province, and nearly 4,000 relief supply trucks have been shipped.
“The government has collected a special earthquake tax from us for 20 years now,” said Gazi Kucukkaya, a resident of the city who was interviewed by phone. “But they haven’t taken any precautions for the earthquake. Where is the government? Why didn’t they prepare for the earthquake in such a dangerous area? What were they doing for so many years?”
Around Antakya, relatives of the missing have set up makeshift watching points, an attempt at ensuring rescue teams do not move on before they retrieve their families. They sat in chairs and couches that tumbled into the street from bent buildings, huddling over fires, fueling them with tree limbs and cardboard boxes to weather the cold.
In one corner of the city, a man watched a crane he’d hired to dig through the rubble of his former building to extract what they could of his precious belongings and gold. Orhan, who asked his last name be omitted because of the sensitivity of the topic, initially disputed claims that the government response was slow, saying they came within hours.
“This is all lies,” said his friend Rafet Yavrum, shaking his head. “They didn’t come to help, they came the third or fourth day. We got out of the rubble by ourselves.”
“The first ones that arrived were the volunteers,” he continued. “If the volunteers didn’t come, the death toll would be double what it is now.” He said supporters of a popular Istanbul-based football team, Besiktas, flocked to the area and saved many lives.
Asked how he got out, Orhan said he was stuck for 22 hours before escaping through an opening that was once a window. When asked about the government response he said had come earlier, he became agitated. “Why would I discredit my government, I’m a Turkish citizen,” he said. “I respect whoever runs the country. When the election comes, everyone will show their will in the ballot.”