Gift of the Givers CEO commends his team for tireless efforts in quake-stricken Türkiye

Gift of the Givers CEO Imtiaz Sooliman has commended his team of volunteers for working tirelessly in the search for survivors of missing earthquake victims in Türkiye.

Thousands of people are still missing since the earthquake on Monday.

Parts of northern Syria have also been devastated.

Several buildings, roads, schools, businesses, and roads have collapsed.

The death toll now stands at over 20 000. At least five million people are in need of aid.

Dr. Sooliman says they’ve got a strong team on the ground.

“The team leaders have travelled with us before. On the first night we got there, these dedicated individuals hardly had any sleep but they wanted to make sure that everyone else was ok. When it comes to equipment, they checked and rechecked to see if everything and everybody was comfortable. In times of need, we all end up covering each other.”

Search for earthquake survivors continues:

Meanwhile, UN aid chief Martin Griffiths appealed on Saturday to remember thousands of people who needed shelter and food while rescuers kept searching for survivors of the devastating earthquake that hit southern Türkiye and northwestern Syria.

Speaking during a news briefing in the Turkish province of Kahramanmaras, as rescuers worked behind him, Griffiths said he spoke to families who had been displaced and left cold and hungry by the quake.

“I am here to make sure these people are not forgotten,” he told reporters.

Griffiths praised Türkiye’s response to the disaster as “extraordinary” and hailed the “courage of first responders working 24-hours, all the time, hoping for one more sound, one more person who survived.”

“It’s the beginning and in my experience, people are always disappointed in the beginning,” he said, in an apparent reference to criticism over the response to the quake.

He said what happened in the area around the epicentre of the quake was a “worst event in 100 years in this region.”

He apparently meant the region’s worst natural disaster: Monday’s earthquake was Türkiye’s most devastating since 1939. Syria’s 11-year civil war, which has killed hundreds of thousands and made millions homeless, remains the region’s deadliest event in recent history.

Griffiths said he was launching a three-month operation for both Türkiye and Syria to help pay for the costs of operations there.

Griffiths also told Reuters he hoped in Syria aid would go to both government and opposition-held areas, but that things with this regard were “not clear yet”.

Rescuers in opposition-held areas have crticized the United Nations and the international community for not responding quickly enough to the urgent needs there. – Additional reporting by Reuters.

Six days since a catastrophic earthquake struck the Türkiye-Syrian border region: