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ALM Feature

Turkey’s earthquake victims at heart of International Women's Day marches

The earthquakes that ravaged 11 provinces in southern Turkey also amplified the socio-economic inequalities between men and women in the region. 
Women take part in a rally ahead of International Women's Day, Istanbul, Turkey, March 6, 2022.

“The destruction you see here is worse than war,” Zeynep Koygulu Yesildag said, speaking from a make-shift greenhouse where her family now lives after two earthquakes destroyed her home in Yesilkoy, a village in Hatay province. “There is nothing here — no tents, no food, little water. But we have to go on.” 

When the first temblor with a 7.8 magnitude hit Turkey’s southeast in the early hours of Feb. 6, Yesildag was not at her home with her husband and three children but at the one-bedroom house of her bedridden mother. She could not get her mother out of the house by herself, and stayed inside as parts of the building collapsed. Eventually, she managed to leave the house, and with her husband's help they took her mother, in the late stages of cancer, to the greenhouse; they arrived there before the second quake hit at noon. Exposed to poor hygienic conditions, no medical care and no means to get to a hospital, Yesildag’s mother died a few days later. “She spend her last days under absolute horrendous conditions in the greenhouse,” Yesildag told Al-Monitor. 

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