Seven weeks have passed since two earthquakes devastated southern Turkey and northern Syria and Orhan Kosker has not stopped looking for his nephews.
Ismet and Sirac, aged 13 and 9, respectively, were sleeping at home in the city of Gaziantep when the tragedy occurred.
The bodies of his parents and his sister, who died in the earthquake, were found nine days later and pulled from the rubble.
But there was no trace of the two children.
Gaziantep, in southeastern Turkey, was one of 11 cities in that country that, on February 6, suffered widespread destruction.
Only in Türkiye is it estimated that they have some 50,000 people died, while nearly 6,000 lives were lost in the north and west of Syria.
The financial cost of the disaster for Turkey is estimated at more than US$100 billion.
help line
While tremendous efforts are being made to provide victims with help so they can have some sort of normality, there are still hundreds of families searching for their missing loved ones, hoping to find them dead or alive.
Witnesses told Orhan that the building where his nephews were staying collapsed within a minute or two of the quake and many people managed to escape.
Orhan was convinced that the children could have survived as well.
Since the earthquakes occurred, about 2,000 children who were rescued from under the rubble have been registered with the authorities, according to official figures provided by the Ministry of Family and Social Affairs.
Nearly 200 of them have yet to be identified and reunited with their families.
The Turkish Ministry of Health created a helpline for earthquake victims and relatives of the missing.
Orhan said she called that line every day to check the list of newly identified children in case her nephews were on it.
His family has also provided DNA samples.
“We want to find our children even if they are dead. Even if we only find his bones, We will continue searching. God help us,” he said.
There is no official figure for the number of people missing in Turkey after the earthquakes. But it is believed that at least 1,400 bodies they have not yet been identified.
missing for a month
For Abdulkudus Kazan, the search for his sister Hicran was harrowing.
Hicran Karadag, 44, was rescued from under the rubble of her apartment just hours after the quake.
She was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, but for the next month her family could not find out if she was alive or dead.
They searched for her in dozens of cities.
Finally they received the information that almost 1,000 victims had been buried in a cemetery in Narlica, on the outskirts of the city of Antioquia.
Common pit
Abdulkudus traveled to the newly built site: it was a mass grave.
Before the unidentified bodies were buried in the cemetery, Turkish authorities took photographs, collected DNA samples and took fingerprints.
Each unidentified victim was placed a number on his grave.
Abdulkudus went through some 1,500 photos looking for his sister. He even opened body bags and checked them to see if Hicran was there.
She shed tears of both relief and sadness when she learned that a dna sample taken at the site matched a body that had been buried in that cemetery.
The death certificate showed that Hicran had lost his life as a result of cardiac arrest, after suffering head and body trauma.
It was not clear if he received any treatment at the hospital.
However, the certificate indicated that his body had been left out in the open for two days, in a parking lot of the field hospital that had been set up.
She was then buried without proper identification.
“It is very difficult to search for your missing relative,” said her sister.
“You don’t know if he’s dead or alive, so you always have hope“.
“Even when the officials told me that the DNA samples matched, I still hoped that they might be wrong, that my sister might be alive.
Now I am relieved that he has his own grave.”
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