The
deadly earthquake on Monday in
Turkey, which was felt in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, was the strongest ever
recorded in Turkey, and the area near its epicenter hosts hundreds of thousands
of Syrian refugees.
اضافة اعلان
At magnitude 7.8, Monday’s quake had the
same magnitude as one that killed about 30,000 people in December 1939 in
northeast Turkey, Stephen Hicks, a research fellow in seismology at Imperial
College London, wrote on Twitter.
The Turkish provinces of Gaziantep and
Kahramanmaras that surround the recent earthquake’s epicenter are not far from
the Syrian border and host hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally
displaced people.
Turkey is home to 3.6 million Syrian refugees,
the largest number in the world from the Syrian civil war, according to the
UNHCR. The agency runs one of its largest operations from the city of
Gaziantep.
People fleeing Syria’s civil war began
streaming into Turkey in 2011. In 2016, the country began building three
“container cities” that repurposed old shipping containers as homes for
refugees. The containers in Kahramanmaras can house up to 25,000 people and are
air-conditioned, but the homes are meant to be temporary.
Meanwhile, Syrian refugees have transformed
the city of Gaziantep. About 500,000 live there and in its surrounding region.
Soap-makers have moved their factories from Aleppo there, Bloomberg reported in
December.
Dan Stoenescu, the European Union envoy to
Syria, said on Twitter that millions of refugees and migrants were at risk and
noted that in nearby northern Syria, “many live in tents & unsafe
buildings,” adding that the EU “will assess the situation & as always is
ready to help people in need.”
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