Ahmed Halak’s mother was attending morning prayers at the family’s apartment in central Turkey last week when she noticed a ceiling lamp on.
She closed her eyes and went back to her prayers, Halak said, when she felt the ground beneath her and heard a noise.
She opened her eyes and shouted to her children: “Earthquake!” Earthquake in Arabic.
“We are used to hearing bombs falling and the ground shaking beneath us,” said Halak, who fled the Syrian war in 2012 and now lives in Fredericton. “But this was different.”
Halaq was visiting his family in the Turkish city of Kayseri when Earthquake occurred on 6 February, The 7.8-magnitude earthquake and powerful aftershocks affected 10 provinces of Turkey, which is home to some 13.5 million people, as well as a large area of northwestern Syria that is home to millions more.
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The death toll, which has eclipsed 35,500 – around 32,000 in Turkey – includes his family. Halak lost his 13-year-old cousin and aunt in the quake, he said in an interview Tuesday.
“They were sleeping when the apartment came crashing down,” he said in Arabic and English with the help of his friend, Mohammed Al Khatib, who translated for him. Al Khatib, who is from Syria, came to Canada in January 2016.
“He was taken to the hospital,” Halaq said. “He died in the hospital.”
He rubbed his face. She said that her another aunt might not be able to come. “He is very badly injured.”
Halak, along with his wife and two children, moved from Turkey to Fredericton in 2016, where he has a downtown tailoring business.
He returned to Turkey last month to test the design and materials, so that he could expand his business, and to see his mother, whom he had last seen almost seven years ago.
On that fateful Monday, a few hours after the first quake, there was a second aftershock – around 2:30 p.m.
“It was too strong,” Halak said, biting his fingernails. “That second hit was really bad. The whole family had to leave the apartment and sit on the street.
Halak said his family has been living in a car since the quake.
Halak unlocked his phone and showed pictures of him with his family in a park – with snow on the ground – near his apartment in Turkey, where he spent his days with them after the earthquake. Hallak has returned to Fredericton, while 14 members of his family spend their days at that park or in their cars. They found a room where they could spend the nights, at least in the short term.
Another photo shows their cement, grey-and-white apartment complex with a deep crack, splitting the building in two.
“There’s my apartment,” he said, pointing to the picture.
He described the city as a pile of rubble, which he said evoked memories of areas hit by bombs and explosions in war-torn Syria.
Halaq’s co-worker Abdulkadir Bashlamuni joined his shop, having moved to Canada from Aleppo, Syria, about two years ago. Bashlamuni said her four sisters and their families are on the streets, living in cars after their apartment building developed deep cracks.
“They are safe from earthquakes,” said Bashlamuni. “But how safe are they in Syria?”
He is worried about them but said he feels helpless.
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Halak echoed those sentiments.
Halak said, “When my mother asks me what I ate, I don’t tell her.” “Because he doesn’t even have anything to eat. On many days, he gets just one meal – provided by relief agencies. A survivor package to keep them alive.”
Money is running out and relief is in short supply, he said.
Halak said he hoped the Canadian government would allow his family to move to Canada. “We moved from Syria to Turkey to avoid the war. We invested everything we had and now it’s all gone.”
“Now, they sleep at night in a room they got. They’re waiting for something, but they don’t know how long to wait and how many things to wait. Sometimes it’s really hard to think Is.
You know what I mean?”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on February 15, 2023.
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