Residents of the largely Muslim city of Adiyaman, Turkey heard the sounds of heavy machinery Friday instead of calls to prayer.
Beaubien said part of the reason there was no call to prayer was the lack of electricity in the city — anything that did have power was running on a generator. It doesn't mean people aren't still praying, he notes, but it speaks to the way the earthquake has disrupted time in Adiyaman."Time actually seems a bit lost to me as well," he said."I actually didn't hear the call to prayer all day."Adiyaman is a city of about 270,000 mostly Muslim residents.
Friday prayers aren't the only custom that Muslims in the city have had to forego in the wake of the disaster. Beaubien said normally, bodies of the dead would be washed before being buried. Now, with so many dead, rescuers have a dispensation from local imams to skip that step of the traditional burial process.
"I'm not sure that's happening everywhere, that they can take the bodies straight to the cemetery and bury them in these trenches that they've laid out," he said."They've basically declared [that] the bodies are clean and they can do that, which is quite unusual." Meanwhile, many survivors lost everything and are sleeping in cars or outside, burning fires in the streets because they're afraid to sleep in a concrete structure, Beaubien said."It is heartbreaking, the number of people who are just crying. So many people have lost loved ones. You hear people crying as you walk just about everywhere. And as a reporter, you start interviewing people and the tears well up in their eyes incredibly quickly before you even ask them who they've lost.
"And [we know that] lots of support came into [Syrian] government-controlled areas from governments who are supportive of Assad like China, like Russia, like Iran, like Iraq, like Algeria," she said.In the early morning hours of Feb. 6, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake rocked southern and central Turkey and northern and western Syria. The death toll had surpassed 24,000 as of Friday and is expected to continue climbing.
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