What It's Like In The Streets Of Adiyaman, Turkey, As Quake Rescue Efforts Continue

On any other Friday night in Adiyaman, a city of more than a quarter million in southeastern Turkey, you'd hear the unmistakable sound of the Adhān, the Muslim call to prayers, resonating from mosques around the city.

But this Friday, the sound of the call to prayer has been replaced by the whine of heavy machinery and the crunch of rubble meeting metal as the residents of this southeastern Turkey city who survived the 7.8 magnitude earthquake continue to dig through building debris for survivors.

"It's Friday and I didn't even realize it because I was not hearing the mosques," NPR correspondent Jason Beaubien told host Larry Mantle on LAist's public affairs show AirTalk — which airs on 89.3 FM.

Beaubien said part of the reason there was no call to prayer was the lack of electricity in the city — anything that did have power was running on a generator. It doesn't mean people aren't still praying, he notes, but it speaks to the way the earthquake has disrupted time in Adiyaman.

"Time actually seems a bit lost to me as well," he said. "I actually didn't hear the call to prayer all day."

Why it matters

A man walks past a collapsed mosque in Adiyaman, Turkey on Feb. 9.

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Ilyas Akengin

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AFP via Getty Images

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Adiyaman is a city of about 270,000 mostly Muslim residents. In Islam, Friday (Jumuʿah in Arabic) is the holy day. The fact that Friday prayers weren't happening at mosques underscores how drastically the earthquake has affected people's ability to live their everyday lives.

Friday prayers aren't the only custom that Muslims in the city have had to forego in the wake of the disaster. Beaubien said normally, bodies of the dead would be washed before being buried. Now, with so many dead, rescuers have a dispensation from local imams to skip that step of the traditional burial process.

"I'm not sure that's happening everywhere, that they can take the bodies straight to the cemetery and bury them in these trenches that they've laid out," he said. "They've basically declared [that] the bodies are clean and they can do that, which is quite unusual."

Meanwhile, many survivors lost everything and are sleeping in cars or outside, burning fires in the streets because they're afraid to sleep in a concrete structure, Beaubien said.

He described witnessing tremendous suffering:

What about Syria?

The majority of the dead are in Turkey, but the situation in parts of Syria hit by the quake is also dire. International aid convoys are finally beginning to make their way into parts of rebel-controlled northern Syria, among the hardest hit in the quake. But BBC Middle East Correspondent Lina Sinjab says many Syrians wish the aid arrived days ago.

"Too little, too late, according to the Syrians trapped in northern Syria," said the Beirut-based Sinjab, who also joined AirTalk Friday. "They say that whatever is arriving is not covering even 20% of their needs," she said.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad surveyed the damage to his country on Friday, and blamed the West for shunning his country and refusing to lift sanctions so international aid could come in. But Sinjab noted that sanctions don't apply to humanitarian aid in the case of natural disasters.

"And [we know that] lots of support came into [Syrian] government-controlled areas from governments who are supportive of Assad like China, like Russia, like Iran, like Iraq, like Algeria," she said.

Listen to the conversation

The backstory

In the early morning hours of Feb. 6, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake rocked southern and central Turkey and northern and western Syria. The death toll had surpassed 24,000 as of Friday and is expected to continue climbing.

The quake's epicenter was near the cities of Nurdağı and Gaziantep, according to the United States Geological Survey.

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