At a funeral near Rehanli, masked women wailed and beat their chests as bodies were being unloaded from lorries – some in closed wooden coffins, others in open caskets, and still others wrapped in blankets.
Some residents sought to reclaim whatever they could from the destruction.
In Elbistan, the epicenter of an aftershock as powerful as Monday’s early 7.8 quake, Mustafa Bahchivan, a 32-year-old mobile shop owner, said he had come into the city almost daily since then. On Sunday, he was rummaging through the rubble to search for any of his phones that might still be intact and salable.
“It used to be one of the busiest roads. Now it’s completely gone,” he said.
Syria aid complicated by years of war
In Syria, the disaster hit hardest in the rebel-held northwest, again rendering homeless many people who had already been displaced several times before by a decade-long civil war. The sector has received very little aid as compared to the government-held areas.
“We have so far failed people in northwest Syria, where only one crossing is open for UN aid supplies,” UN aid chief Martin Griffiths said on Twitter from the Turkey-Syria border.
“They feel rightfully abandoned,” Griffiths said, which he was increasingly focused on addressing.