A US resident from Pakistan has anonymously donated $30m to victims of the earthquake that recently killed thousands of people in Turkey and Syria and devastated the countries’ infrastructure, according to officials.
Word of the Pakistani businessman’s kindness has provided a rare instance of uplifting news amid the mounting death and damage toll associated with the calamity.
The prime minister of Pakistan, Shehbaz Sharif, tweeted Saturday that he was “deeply moved by the example” set by an anonymous compatriot who walked into the Turkish embassy in the US capital of Washington DC and made the multimillion-dollar donation to benefit victims of the quake.
Sharif’s tweet added: “These are such glorious acts of philanthropy that enable humanity to triumph over the seemingly insurmountable odds.”
The editor-in-chief of the political news outlet the Election Post, Mustafa Tanyeri, tweeted that Turkey’s ambassador to Washington DC, Murat Mercan, had confirmed the contribution to the earthquake aid campaign launched in the US.
The donation also came in after the United Nations world food program made appeals for $77m to provide rations to at least 590,000 people displaced in Turkey and 284,000 in Syria. According to the program, about 45,000 of those people were refugees, and another 545,000 were displaced internally.
As of Sunday morning in the US, more than 33,000 people had died after the immense 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck parts of Turkey and Syria six days earlier. That toll is almost certainly going to increase as rescue crews’ expectations of finding survivors fade with each passing day.
Nearly 30,000 of the dead in the toll as of Sunday were in Turkey. Meanwhile, the area of Syria affected by the earthquake was a north-western part where many people had already been displaced repeatedly by a decade-old civil war there.
That particular region is held by rebels rather than the government, so it has received little aid when compared to other affected areas, even with the US temporarily easing its sanctions on Syria with hopes of speeding up the delivery of help.
“We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria,” UN aid chief Martin Griffiths tweeted Saturday from that country’s border with Turkey. Further complicating relief efforts is that only a single crossing on the border between Turkey and Syria is open for UN aid.
Outside the $30m donation by the Pakistani businessman living in the US for the earthquake’s victims, those following developments in Turkey and Syria have had to turn to stories of survival for a reprieve from the relentlessly climbing death toll.
One of those stories centers on 54-year-old Malik Milandi of Syria, who survived 156 hours in rubble left behind by the earthquake before a team of Chinese rescuers and Turkish firefighters saved him.
Meanwhile, another involved a toddler, a father with his five-year-old daughter, and a 10-year-old girl having been rescued from collapsed buildings in southern Turkey almost a week after the earthquake.
Source: theguardian
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