Uzbek volunteers serve traditional food to quake victims in southern Türkiye

By Burak Dag

HATAY, Türkiye (AA) — Volunteers from Uzbekistan, including a singer known throughout the Central Asian country, served traditonal food to about 2,000 earthquake victims in southern Türkiye on Monday.

"Our main goal is to show people the devastation because it is not like what you see on social media," singer Sardor Rahimkhan told Anadolu in Hatay, one of the provinces hit hardest by back-to-back earthquakes earlier this month.

Rahimkhan, who also founded the charity Yurak Amri, helped serve a traditional Uzbek rice and meat dish known as osh to survivors of the earthquakes in a tent city set up by Turkish drone maker Baykar in the district of Samandag in Hatay.

Underscoring the need for long-term help for victims of the earthquakes, which that heavily affected a large area across 11 provinces home to over 13 million people in Türkiye, Rahimkhan said: "They need houses, clothings."

"Could you imagine, the morning when we started to give breakfast, one person came and asked about water. A person coming and asking about food, bread," he said, pointing to the dire needs of the quake survivors. "Even, they have no water to drink."

- Yurak Amri to stay until 'quake victims start to live better than before'

Fazliddin Rustamov, one of the volunteers in the tent city, said the charity was planning to stay in Hatay "until quake victims start to live better than before."

"When the earthquake occurred, we were in Istanbul. From the second day we took our staff and arrived in Hatay and began to help people," Rustamov said.

"We are doing our best by serving three meals in a day to people," he stressed, underlining that quake victims are right now facing with many challenges from housing to clothing.

Such a disaster could befall anybody, he went on to say, urging empathy with earthquake victims and aid to be sent to them.

On the needs of survivors, he said: "We will start to give our attention to other needs of victims such as housing, as over hundreds of thousands people have found themselves homeless (after the quakes)."

He expressed hoped that with public support, survivors would soon move into new homes.

Officials at Baykar, the drone maker that set up the tent city, thanked the Yurak Amri for its efforts, said Rustamov, with the compay's chief technology officer Selcuk Bayraktar paying a recent visit and voicing his gratitude to Uzbek volunteers.

At least 44,374 people have been killed by two strong earthquakes that jolted southern Türkiye on Feb. 6.

The 7.7 and 7.6 magnitude earthquakes, centered in the Kahramanmaras province, affected more than 13 million people across 11 provinces, including Adana, Adiyaman, Diyarbakir, Gaziantep, Hatay, Kilis, Malatya, Osmaniye, Elazig and Sanliurfa.