Left without a trace: Families search for missing children of Turkey's earthquake

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - ISTANBUL — Four-year-old Emir was at home with his family when two devastating earthquakes hit southern Turkey on 6 February 2023, claiming the lives of more than 53,500 people.

The bodies of his mother, father and 10-year-old brother were found in the wreckage of their apartment block in Antakya, a city on the Syrian border.

But there was no trace of him.

Two years on, Emir is still missing. Dozens of families continue to search for their loved ones and at least 30 of the missing are children.

Emir's aunt Nursen Kisa arrived at the collapsed building in Antakya an hour after the earthquake and waited beside the debris for over two weeks while search and rescue operations continued.

"We thought we could find him, or at least a piece of his clothing, some remains, some sort of a trace. But there were none. Neither in the debris nor among the bodies," she said.

Since then, she has been on a mission to find her missing nephew.

She filed a missing person's claim at the police station, only for the authorities to call three months later to say they had no paperwork showing Emir was missing.

Her initial inquiry most likely got lost so the whole process had to start from scratch.

In the meantime Nursen posted pictures of her nephew all over social media in the hope that someone would recognise him. She visited dozens of orphanages across Turkey.

Her sister's remains were exhumed so that DNA samples could be compared with remains that had yet to be identified.

None of her efforts were successful.

She said she had even had occasional calls from local authorities asking how Emir was coping. For her it meant that her nephew had not yet been officially recorded as missing.

Two years on from the earthquakes, the number of missing is still unclear.

In April 2023, the internal affairs minister at the time said "a missing person claim was filed for 297 people, 86 of whom were children".

By November 2024, current Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced that 75 people were still missing and that 30 of them were children.

That contrasted with the main opposition party, who said they had a list of 140 missing people, 38 of whom were children. They shared their list with the minister but received no response, they told BBC News Turkish.

Sema Gulec, spokesperson of a foundation to locate the missing, believes the discrepancy may be because the interior ministry has not counted those whose families have officially accepted them as deceased.

After the earthquake, various allegations were made about children being rescued from under the rubble but then going missing.

The implication was that they had then been abducted, although these claims were denied by authorities.

In January 2024, the governing party and its right-wing ally voted down a parliamentary motion calling for an investigation into the missing children.

Then a commission to investigate the cases of the missing people was formed within Turkey's Disaster Management Authority (Afad) — a government agency that operates under the interior ministry.

Afad has been using several techniques to search for the missing, says Sema Gulec, whose 24-year-old son is among the disappeared.

These techniques range from comparing DNA taken from the relatives of the missing with samples from the bodies buried without identification, to using a facial recognition system and comparing pictures of the missing with records filed with the police, she explains.

However, opposition figures have accused authorities of irregularities or incompetence. They cite the example of a young woman who was buried under a different identity, only to be exhumed and identified a year later.

"There could be dozens of others buried under false identities," said Nermin Yildirim Kara, an MP from the main opposition party.

She also argued that some of the rubble was cleared before all necessary scanning was made, citing as an example a famous residency building in Antakya where 48 people remain unaccounted for.

"That debris was cleared in such haste that maybe some of the remains also got destroyed in the process," she said.

BBC News approached both Afad and the interior ministry for comment, but they declined to respond.

In the meantime, families of the missing continue their search for answers.

"A proper scan was not carried out. They removed the debris immediately, and we could not stop them," said Ayse Ambarcioglu, whose sister and six-month-old niece went missing.

"Two years have gone by already. What are [the authorities] supposed to do now — bring a piece of bone and say this belongs to your sister?"

"We would settle just for a single bone, but nothing was found," said Caner Yurdakul, whose sister, brother-in-law and their six-year-old twin daughters disappeared after the earthquake.

The cities scarred by the devastating tremors in southern Turkey are rife with such accounts. But many relatives of the missing are determined to carry on with their search for answers.

"There is nothing yet to prove that my nephew Emir is either dead or alive," said Nursen Kisa. "I am never going to succumb to pressure and report him as deceased." — BBC