UN chief: Reuniting children with their families is priority after earthquake

world
Un Chief: Reuniting Children With Their Families Is Priority After Earthquake
Catherine Russell, © Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Share this article

By Omar Sanadiki, Associated Press

Reuniting children with their missing family has become a top priority in the aftermath of last month’s massive earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria, the head of the UN children’s agency said on Wednesday.

Unicef executive director Catherine Russell said the February 6 quake that rocked south east Turkey and parts of northern Syria has compounded existing crises in war-torn Syria.

Advertisement

“The first challenge is figuring out if (the) children’s parents are alive in some place, and if they are trying to reunite them,” she told the Associated Press, speaking at a school in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.

Since the quake, the school has been turned into a shelter for families who lost their homes.


Advertisement

 

In Turkey, Derya Yanik, the minister for family affairs, said on Wednesday that more than 1,800 “unaccompanied children” have been reunited with their families since the quake.

Efforts were underway to identify 83 other children and reunite them with family members, Ms Yanik said.

Some of the children who have not been identified were still in intensive care in hospitals in Turkey, she added, and more than 350,000 families had applied to foster children orphaned by the quake.

Advertisement

The Turkey-Syria earthquake killed at least 50,000 people and injured many more, according to the UN with tens of thousands still missing and hundreds of thousands homeless.


Syria Turkey Earthquake
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus visits a hospital in western Syria (AP Photo/Omar Albam)

In Syria, at least 6,000 were killed in total, in both government-controlled areas and in the rebel-held territory in the country’s north west.

Advertisement

That region in the hands of Syrian rebels is home to 4.6 million people, many of them previously displaced by Syria’s war, was hardest hit in Syria,

Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and a financial hub before the war, witnessed some of the fiercest fighting in the nearly 12-year conflict that has killed at least 300,000 people and displaced half the country’s population of 23 million.

The earthquake further destroyed thousands of homes in Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria and decimated infrastructure as medical groups sounded the alarm on possible health crises breaking out in quake-hit areas.

“We need to make sure that children continue to get their education and that is very difficult,” Ms Russell also told AP.

Advertisement

Almost one month after the quake, many families are still living in schools, mosques, churches, and other makeshift shelters after their homes were destroyed.

At the same time, Ms Russell fears that keeping families in places such as the school-turned-shelter in Aleppo for a long period of time could see children fall behind in their education.

Unicef is holding some classes at such shelters so children “don’t drop out of school”.

“We need to make sure that children continue to get their education and that is very difficult,” she added.

Also on Wednesday, the World Health Organisation chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, visited the rebel-held north west, crossing into Syria from Turkey to follow up on the needs of those affected by the earthquake.

Mr Ghebreyesus’s visit to Syria was his second after a tour of the northern city of Aleppo last month after the quake.

“Even before the earthquake, needs were increasing while international aid was decreasing,” Mr Ghebreyesus said at a press conference.

“I call on the leaders of both sides of the Syrian conflict to use the shared suffering of this crisis as a platform for peace.”

Read More

Message submitting... Thank you for waiting.

Want us to email you top stories each lunch time?

Download our Apps
© BreakingNews.ie 2024, developed by Square1 and powered by PublisherPlus.com