Syrian earthquake survivors in Turkey have nowhere to go

SOMEWHERE in the debris of the apartment building in Kahramanmaras where he had stayed with his brother’s family are Jamal’s jacket, his wallet, phone and identity papers. They are all he has left. Friends rescued Jamal, a young refugee from Syria who has made Turkey his home over the past five years, from the collapsed building hours after the first earthquake. Days later, rescue workers retrieved the bodies of his brother and his four children. Jamal spent a week in hospital, with injuries to his back and his legs, then returned to look for his valuables in the rubble.Syrians are no strangers to destruction, displacement, and to burying their loved ones. The 3.7m who settled in Turkey in the past decade, having escaped Syria’s murderous war, had hoped to spare their children the same fate. Many such hopes collapsed on February 6th, when a pair of earthquakes ripped through southern Turkey, home to almost half of the country’s Syrian refugees, killing at least 45,000 people. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians, as well as their Turkish neighbours, lost everything, again.