Prayers up for Turkey and Syria. 1500 dead earthquake magnitude 7.8.

[Ruhi_Rose]

Absolutely.   Not humans, but pedigreed bastards of some uncanny species.

[Zainab_M]

Turkiye and Syria death toll now nearly 20,000.   Injured over 100,000.  Hundreds of thousands displaced. 

International world is making distinctions.  Syria needs help just as much.  Both Turkiye and Syria need same help. This is NOT the time to snub based on political ties. 



Suriye (Syria):  A recently displaced person huddled in a blanket.

[N. Truth Seeker]

Yes sister, unfortunately I've been observing the same too.  They are justifying the disproportionate help on numbers.  With Turkiye death toll 15,800 and Suriye approximately 3,000 plus, they are using it to cover political bias.  That is far from appropriate.  Damage is just as extensive in Suriye.  They see it as worse than years of war.



The earthquake is bringing back memories of recent man-made disasters

[Zainab_M]

💔😥

[Ruhi_Rose]

The death toll seems to have slowed at the enormous number of nearly 20,000.  It will still keep rising, though slowly, as many who continue to remain stuck under the rubble gradually get rescued.  To be seen how many are rescued alive. 

With the country's elections looming in May this year, Erdogan might seem to be in some trouble.  Rescue response to the quake has been slower than expected and too much of the infrastructure has fallen flat like concrete pancakes.  All this is causing plenty of anger among the people asking why in a country with multiple fault lines and a history of major jolts should the construction quality be so poor that buildings fall apart like houses of cards?


 


But despite the peoples' fury it might not be that easy to vote Erdogan out in May as overlooked by the very stupid Al-Monitor commentator, Amberin Zaman.  According to her, in democracies (referring to Erdogan's rule) such a situation could make it hard for the leader as democracies face accountability.  From the same perspective she's of the view Assad of Syria is secure regardless of the earthquake as his position will not be affected by the suffering of the people.  These crazy journalists don't realize that at this time thousands who have been impacted aren't thinking of politics.  No one cares in Syria who is in power, they are just waiting for help, whoever gets it.  At the moment, other than Assad they cannot think of anyone else who could even deliver that much.  The 'rebels' already proved their inability to deliver even during normal times. You certainly cannot expect to run a system successfully in a dire emergency such as this.  They Syrian people know that. And since Assad has agreed on cross border aid for quake victims in rebel held areas, that pretty much resolves the issue.  As for Erdogan, though he wasn't visionary enough to perceive that Assad was no threat to him like the Turk secularists, yet he's quite smart when it comes to cutting corners and not getting hung up on ethics with under-the-table manipulative steps to hang on to power.  He will manage it.  If the people then grumble, they will be silenced.  Simply holding elections as a showmanship is no sign of democracy and Western countries have proven it far better than anyone would expect.

[Heba E. Husseyn]

Yeah, that woman is daft.  She keeps contradicting herself every now and again.  On the one hand she talks of Erdogan’s one-man rule responsible for making the earthquake response worse.  On the other hand she views his government accountable as a democracy.  She is simply taking the practical procedure of elections as symbolic of democracy, as if that would really make Erdogan forget his political tricks and become the peoples’ man.  He has already clung on to power for two decades and gamed the system, twisting the constitution to transfer power to the president when he could no longer carry on as PM.  Fortunately he did have enough support so he stayed on.  Throughout the pandemic his performance wasn’t the best with inflation hitting a staggering 80%.  Yet the people said no problem.  And now as they struggle to bring a semblance of normalcy in their lives, political arguments to choose their best guy in a country with a leadership problem will hardly be an attractive option.  Those people are presently too distracted and during the elections they will probably think  “we’re more comfortable with the devil we know” kind of approach. 

[Ruhi_Rose]

Exactly, that's the way it will all turn out.  Not to mention, Erdogan will make plenty of promises and embellish his campaign with rhetoric.  I just hope his campaign rhetoric materializes into something more real this time because the damage is just so widespread and intense.  Insh'Allah.

[Heba E. Husseyn]

Insh'Allah, I hope the same.

[N. Truth Seeker]

Very thought provoking for sure.  In my opinion seems like very few people are now thinking of elections, much less how they intend to vote. 

Btw, the death toll has crossed 20,000.  It's around 24,000.  In five days the earthquake deaths have been 24,000.   But the mainstream media is still perpetually concerned about Ukraine where in the last one year the death toll has been less than 8,000.

[Ruhi_Rose]

😥

[Zainab_M]

Death toll in eastern Turkiye and western Suriye now stands at 37,000.  With that much of rubble all over, only Allah knows when this uptick will end.  Definitely seems rescue efforts aren't correctly balanced between the two countries while hospitals in Suriye are in complete chaos.

[Heba E. Husseyn]

Unfortunately yes .... some say it could end up reaching 100,000.  Spot on about the discrepantly balanced relief work.  Most foreign rescue teams are wholly focused on Turkiye.  I'm glad they've gone for the work.  But they are ignoring one ravaged spot and only looking at the other.  I don't know when the world will learn to respect justice.  Probably some have reservations that Syria is a war-torn country or a war zone and they have safety concerns.  Many of those foreign rescue teams are very ignorant too.

[N. Truth Seeker]

Keeps rising between 5,000 and 10,000 each day. 

Yesterday we were talking over it at dinner.  We were wondering could these countries have done anything drastically wrong that has caused this wrath come upon them from The Almighty?   Iraq's Muqtada al-Sadr was saying Turkey's response to the burning of the Noble Quran was weak which has caused it.  I don't agree with him.  Turkey's response to the incident was not weak.  Thousands and thousands of them came in the streets and spoke aloud and so did their government.

[Heba E. Husseyn]

I certainly don't agree with Muqtada al-Sadr either, so I won't take up his view at all.

Of course such matters are precisely known only to Allah.  HE decides at some point on every issue based on every aspect of peoples' intent and actions.  We can only guess.  Though certain of our guessed assessments may appear right, there will be many we cannot understand because we don't know the inside story.  But Allah knows every bit of everything.

We were all following the Syrian war closely and Turkiye's role in it.  That was one thing for which Erdogan's policies (enthusiastically supporting the invaders to the delight of the West and Israel) remain unforgivable.  As the various factions of AQ fighters went on deadly rampages for almost a decade starting 2011 - murder, rape, arson, destruction of Syria's infrastructure including those beautiful historical Mosques, human trafficking etc. - much of all this was concentrated between the border areas of the two countries.  Take a look at the map of both places.   Most AQ human traffickers aided by groups of various Syrian "rebels" carried out most of their human trafficking of helpless Syrian women and girls torn apart from their families or kidnapped through those borders into Turk towns of Sanliurfa, Gaziantep and Diyabakir.  These places became fully fledged 'markets' of selling females to those oil rich Arab tycoons in UAE, Qatar, Kuwait etc.   Not to mention the mayhem by AQ terrorists and the unconscientious "rebels" inside Syria in places like Aleppo, Idlib, Raqqa, Lattakia.  Several of those terrorists and "rebels" are still residing in those territories and the treacherous elements of the Syrian population are still supporting them.  These are the areas badly hit by the earthquake.  That doesn't exonerate the Syrian government which also made many mistakes.  I'm not talking about Assad being a "dictator."  But as the Syrian war progressed, by 2016 or 2017 Assad began showing signs of becoming quite an Islamophobe.  Most of his senior ministers displayed an attitude of foolish treachery on historical events supporting Russian victories against the Ottomans and in present times promoting Syria's secularism on rigid Western lines .. even though Arab secularism is a whole lot different from western secularism as maintained during the times of Hafez al-Assad.  Bashar largely forgot that.  They all started viewing the Ottomans as synonymous with Erdogan's rule which is much too ridiculous.  Bashar al-Assad lost all compassion for the suffering Muslims in other countries such as the Palestinians, Yemenis, Kashmiris, Rohingyas.  In an interview with an Indian journalist he even supported Delhi's stance of occupying Kashmir with not a shred of sympathy nor awareness of how badly India has been treating the Muslims in the occupied region of Kashmir.  He also refused to sympathize with the Rohingyas suffering ethnic cleansing since 2012.  He also did not support the homegrown revolution of Yemen even though Ansarullah of Yemen is a staunch ally of Hezb'Allah which has been pivotal is helping Assad to win the Syrian war.  Erdogan, as we know, has his own share of mistakes that is largely reflected in the suffering of many Syrians in those parts of eastern Turkiye.  These are just a few things we saw and know.  There are surely many other violations that should never have happened which we don't know.  But Allah knows everything. 

I personally think this string of wrongdoings from both sides may be viewed as at least one of the causes.  But only HE knows best.

[N. Truth Seeker]

Very, very helpful read with map .. straightforward and honest.