The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) stressed Tuesday that more than seven million children have been affected by last week’s earthquakes in southern Turkey, near the Syrian border, and stressed that they and their families «desperately» need more support.
Agency spokesman James Elder said that 4.6 million children were living in the ten Turkish provinces affected by the earthquakes, while 2.5 million children are affected in the affected areas in Syria. «As families face the horrific and heartbreaking reality that the priority in Turkey and Syria is beginning to be recovery rather than rescue, UNICEF fears that thousands of children have died. Even without verified figures, it is tragically clear that the numbers will continue to rise,» he said.
«Many members of our local partner and first responder organizations have been killed, injured or displaced, and their offices and equipment destroyed,» he has lamented. «Everyone, everywhere, needs more support. More safe water. More warmth. More shelter. More medicine. More funding,» Elder added during a press conference from the Swiss city of Geneva.
Thus, he detailed that «families with children are sleeping in the streets, shopping centers, schools, mosques, bus stations and under bridges, and remain with their children outdoors for fear of returning home and not being able to assess the structural damage and the potential impact of the aftershocks on their homes».
«This means that tens of thousands of families are therefore exposed to the elements at a time of year when temperatures are below freezing and snow and freezing rain are common. Every day the numbers of children with hypothermia and respiratory infections are increasing,» he said.
Elder has stressed that UNICEF is distributing drinking water, winter clothing and nutritional items in Syria, while in Turkey it has proceeded to distribute children’s winter clothing, hygiene kits for families, babies and mothers, and blankets. «UNICEF is also procuring sleeping bags, chargers and sleeping chairs in the ten affected provinces (in Turkey),» he has outlined.
«Given the catastrophic and growing death toll, it is clear that many, many children will have lost their parents in these devastating earthquakes,» Elder said, noting that UNICEF is coordinating with Turkey’s Ministry of Family and Social Services to «help identify unaccompanied and separated children and ensure that their basic needs are met.»
» In addition, for these children, ten new hotlines have been launched. Alongside these efforts, UNICEF is also working with partners to provide affected children with essential psychosocial and mental health support services. Many of them, especially in war-affected areas of Syria, are experiencing one irreversible trauma upon another,» he said.
Moreover, he explained that «to rapidly expand the reach of psychosocial support to children, UNICEF has trained nearly 70 trainers of trainers in psychological first aid, while mobilizing longer-term psychosocial and mental health support and providing hundreds of recreational kits that will give tens of thousands of children items to help them cope with the impact of the earthquake through stimulation, learning and restoring a sense of normalcy.»
The UNICEF spokesperson has also recalled «the unprecedented hardships faced by children in Syria» and emphasized that «all children under the age of virtually twelve have only known conflict, violence and displacement.» «Some children have been displaced up to six or seven times,» he noted.
«More than 1.7 million registered refugees from Syria live in Turkey’s ten affected provinces and an estimated 811,000 of them are children. Years of violence, destruction and deteriorating economic conditions have made living conditions unbearable. This seems to be the last chance for the international community to show solidarity with these millions of children,» he added.
The Turkish authorities have raised this Tuesday to about 32,000 the dead because of the earthquakes, balance to which must be added 1,414 dead in areas controlled by the Syrian government and about 2,300 in rebel-held areas in the northwest of the country, according to data from the Syrian Civil Defense, known as ‘white helmets’.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
