In devastated areas, many victims, but little time

GAZIANTEP, Turkiye — Thinly stretched rescue teams worked through the night into Wednesday, pulling more bodies from the rubble of thousands of buildings downed in Turkiye and Syria by an earthquake that killed more than 11,000, as international teams joined the search for survivors.

Turkiye's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was to travel to the town of Pazarcik, and to the worst-hit province of Hatay on Wednesday.

Turkiye had about 60,000 aid personnel in the quake-hit zone, but with devastation so widespread that many are still waiting for help.

Erdogan said on Wednesday that there were some problems in the initial response to the massive earthquakes.

Speaking to reporters in the Kahramanmaras Province near the epicenter of the earthquake, with constant ambulance sirens in the background, Erdogan said there had been problems with roads and airports but that everything would get better by the day.

Meanwhile, rescuers were racing against time and bitter cold to find survivors. "We have found survivors here, but also corpses. We can't abandon the search, the next hours will be crucial to find people still alive," Mehmet, a Turkish rescuer, told Xinhua on Tuesday, referring to rescue efforts in Kahramanmaras.

His team was searching for trapped residents under a mound of rubble that used to be the Ebrar apartment complex, flattened by two powerful tremors.

Once in a while, they ask anguished people who gathered around the rubble searching for family members or volunteers to remain completely silent as they listen out for someone to call for help.

"The problem here is that if there are other survivors, they had to endure the cold which can cause hypothermia, and their chances of survival are getting slim," Mehmet said.

Search teams from more than two dozen countries joined Turkish emergency personnel, and aid pledges poured in. Countries around the globe offered assistance to devastated areas.

The World Health Organization said its network of emergency medical teams had been activated to provide essential healthcare for the injured and most vulnerable.

More than two days after Monday's predawn earthquake, which hit a huge area and brought down thousands of buildings, frigid temperatures and aftershocks were complicating rescue efforts.

Cambodia said it was providing humanitarian aid of $100,000 to earthquake-hit Turkiye, the country's foreign ministry said in a news release on Wednesday.

Malaysia has sent a rescue team to Turkiye to help bolster efforts to aid victims of an earthquake, Malaysia's foreign ministry said on Wednesday. The 70-member team has arrived in Istanbul and has been transported to the disaster area in Adana, the ministry said in a statement.

New Zealand is providing $632,000 to the Turkish Red Crescent and $316,000 to the Syrian Arab Red Crescent to deliver items such as food, tents and blankets, as well as provide medical assistance and psychological support.

But with devastation spread across many cities and towns, some isolated by the civil war in Syria, voices crying from within mounds of rubble have fallen silent, and despair has grown from those still waiting for help.

As many as 23 million people could be affected in the quake-hit region, said Adelheid Marschang, an emergencies officer with the WHO, who called it a "crisis on top of multiple crises".

Many survivors in Turkiye have had to sleep in cars, outside or in government shelters.

"We don't have a tent, we don't have a heating stove, we don't have anything," Aysan Kurt, 27, said. "We did not die from hunger or the earthquake, but we will die freezing from the cold."

Erdogan said 13 million of the country's 85 million people were affected, and he declared a state of emergency in 10 provinces.

In Syria, the United Nations said it was "exploring all avenues" to get supplies to the northwest.

Agencies - Xinhua