The first U.N. team arrived in opposition-held northwestern Syria on Tuesday, eight days after two major earthquakes that destroyed homes and killed at least 35,000 people in Türkiye and Syria.
As hopes fade of finding people alive under the debris more than a week after the magnitude 7.7 and 7.6 earthquakes struck, the focus has switched to providing food and shelter to the vast numbers of survivors.
But activists and emergency teams in Syria's northwest have decried the U.N.'s slow response to the quake in opposition-held areas, contrasting it with the planeloads of humanitarian aid delivered to government-controlled airports.
"I don't want to sit here and give excuses, but I wanted to share that we are all collectively in the same place," Sanjana Quazi, who heads the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Türkiye, told reporters in the opposition-held town of Sarmada.
Fears have grown for survivors on both sides of the border, with the U.N. saying more than seven million children have been negatively impacted between Syria and Türkiye and noting fears that "many thousands" more had died.
"It is tragically clear that numbers will continue to grow," said James Elder, spokesman for the U.N. children's agency UNICEF, adding that the final toll would be "mind-boggling."
The confirmed death toll from the quake stands at 35,662 as officials and medics said 31,974 people had died in Türkiye and at least 3,688 in Syria.
The count has barely changed in Syria for several days and was expected to rise.
The disaster's mental strain was accompanied by the brutal realities of surviving in cities turned to ruin in the middle of the winter freeze.
In Türkiye's Kahramanmaraş, huge crowds depended on a single toilet that still functioned in a central mosque.
"There are no toilets; the toilets should be set up in tents," Hüsne Düz, 53, who has lived with thousands of others in a tent city for the past week.
"I walk five kilometers every day to come here for a toilet. We cannot find any other place," Erdal Lale, 44, told Agence France-Prese (AFP).
The acrid smell of smoke from hundreds of fires that people have kept going to keep away the cold permeated much of Türkiye's disaster zone.
"We need to take showers. So there is a need for washing machines for clothes," Düz said.
Aid for Syria
An AFP reporter said that in the devastated Turkish city of Antakya, clean-up teams have been shifting rubble and putting up basic toilets as the telephone network started to come back in parts of the town.
AFP teams reported that food and other aid supplies were flowing into the city, as well as Kahramanmaraş.
But getting aid into neighboring Syria, already racked by 12 years of civil war, is of particular concern.
Syrian President Bashar Assad, isolated and subject to Western sanctions, called for international assistance to help rebuild infrastructure in the country.
A Saudi plane carrying aid landed in the second city Aleppo, the first in more than a decade of war in Syria, a transport ministry official told AFP, with two more consignments expected later this week.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Monday that Assad has agreed to open two more border crossings from Turkey to northwest Syria to allow aid.
Before the earthquake struck, almost all of the crucial humanitarian aid for the more than four million people living in rebel-controlled areas of northwest Syria was delivered through just one crossing.
An aid convoy crossed from Türkiye into opposition-held north Syria on Tuesday at a newly opened crossing, the first through Bab al-Salama since last week's earthquake, the United Nations said.
An AFP correspondent at the crossing confirmed the U.N. convoy had gone in. At the same time, Paul Dillon, spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, told AFP in Geneva that "11 trucks" entered through "the newly opened Bab al-Salama border."
