Not sure if this needs its own thread or if there’s an inactive Turkey megathread somewhere, will leave to mods to judge.
A 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck southeastern Turkey a couple hours ago, heard some initial reports on it on the BBC’s evening radio service that NPR carries as I was coming home from work. Further reporting indicates the scale of damage is indeed massive— cities from Antakya & Adana all the way to Diyarbakir are reporting thousands of collapsed buildings, and the death toll appears to likely be in the thousands (the last figure I saw was already over a thousand, and I don’t feel the need to give updates every time that’s revised upwards as it surely will be). There also appears to have been extensive damage inside already-wartorn northern Syria, and the disaster will be complicated by the harsh winter weather much of this region is experiencing.
I’m sure everyone’s thoughts are with the thousands still trapped in the rubble and the rescuers working to save them. This looks set to be one of the worst earthquakes in recent memory, up there with Haiti and Sichuan, in terms of humanitarian impact (mercifully it doesn’t appear to have generated any Mediterranean tsunamis). Presumably the death toll will rise over the next few days and then stabilize, and Turkey will present estimates of damages— by way of discussion, what will this mean for Turkey & Syria? What will this mean for the Erdogan government and the AKP, for the Turkish economy? Will there be any effect on the Assad regime or other Syrian forces? Given Turkey’s pivotal role in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, should we expect Ankara to make diplomatic concessions to either side in exchange for aid?
It’s obviously too soon to say yet how rescue and relief efforts are going, but I’d just note that major disasters like this can be moments of great opportunity or great danger for authoritarian governments, depending on how their relief effort performs and is perceived by the public. On a personal note, being from the PNW, I worry that the horrific scenes now coming out of Gaziantep and other cities will be a grim prologue (from a U.S. perspective) for the eventual next slip of the Cascadia subduction zone off the US Pacific coast, as we’ve spent decades building up urban areas full of structures that we know can’t withstand the expected strength of that looming disaster.
