ADIYAMAN, Turkey — Algerian rescue workers were this city’s heroes for a few minutes Wednesday after they freed two children from a collapsed apartment building, on a broad boulevard lined with destruction, long past the time anyone expected good news.
But there were no relatives waiting to receive the children: a girl, maybe 7, wearing a white T-shirt, and a younger boy with close-cropped hair. It was possible that family members would find them later, at a hospital, but also that their parents or other relatives were still under the rubble. Instead, it was a stranger — a Turkish charity worker — who sobbed uncontrollably outside the tent where the children were recovering, as if they were his own.
The Algerians, along with rescue teams from Spain, Taiwan, Pakistan and elsewhere, were part of the patchwork relief effort that began to gather pace in Adiyaman and other ravaged parts of southern Turkey on Wednesday, including visits by volunteers bringing food from other cities. But the distribution of government supplies — after days of complaints by survivors desperate for aid — was at times scattershot and chaotic.
Turkey’s government has appealed for international help in the aftermath of Monday’s earthquakes, which have killed more than 12,000 people in Turkey and Syria. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan toured Hatay province Wednesday, a focal point of the devastation, where he announced that the death toll in the country had eclipsed 9,000 and vowed to rebuild cities and find shelter for residents who had been made homeless.
Anger here over the government response was still raw, though. Crowds gathered outside flattened dwellings, demanding to know why they were not being searched for survivors. And they confronted the provincial governor, chanting that Adiyaman had been “forsaken,” according to a video that circulated online.
Turkey’s health minister said Tuesday that at least 900 people had died in the city, home to 250,000 in the largely Kurdish southeast, but residents on Wednesday said the tally was likely to be much higher.
Throngs of people gathered around trucks that delivered large tents, part of a haphazard aid delivery effort that also included the distribution of water and some clothes. Scuffles broke out as the tents were thrown down from a truck near the city center.
Somehow, Pakize Icer secured one of the tents, which was much larger than she was. She could not seem to figure out how to get it into her car, and instead stood shivering, in a thin sweater, with the tent at her feet. She and her family were living between some buildings, she said, and then began to cry, saying her uncle was still missing. “His whole family is dead,” she said. “Will we see better days?”
But many were trying to help. Just outside the city center, Halil Gulmus, a 60-year-old truck driver who had transported an excavator to Adiyaman, offered a ride out of town to a Syrian family who had lost their home. But the road to the airport was closed, he said, apologizing for letting them down. “Do you need water?” he asked. But what they needed was a tent.
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