Fears of Child Trafficking in Turkey Grow as Earthquake Leaves Scores of Orphans
A Turkish charity organization filed a criminal complaint on Friday in the name of orphans and lost children it claimed have been victims of human trafficking in the wake of the devastating earthquake that hit the country and Syria on February 6.
The group, Önce Çocuklar ve Kadınlar Derneği (“The Children and Women First Association”), alleged that cults and other nefarious actors were capitalizing on the large number of abandoned, orphaned, or otherwise unaccompanied children the Turkish government has yet to take in its custody in the wake of the earthquakes.
Turkish officials have identified more than a dozen infants and potentially thousands of children who will need to be rehomed following the earthquakes. They have struggled to identify many of them, as they are found without identification and often cannot fully identify themselves. As Turkey struggles to identify the children, desperate parents in the most devastated communities search shelters and rubble for their missing children, hoping they survived.
Turkey and northwest Syria experienced a 7.8-magnitude earthquake in the early morning hours of February 6, when a vast majority of people in the region were indoors, still asleep or keeping out of the bitter winter cold. The initial earthquake has been followed by thousands of aftershocks, some close to or surpassing the 7-magnitude threshold. At least one aftershock registered at 7.5 magnitude:
As of Friday, Turkish and Syrian authorities have confirmed over 44,000 deaths in the earthquakes, more than 38,000 of them in Turkey. Much of northwest Syria is not under the control of dictator Bashar Assad, falling instead to Syrian Kurdish organizations and jihadist militias, making it much more difficult to assess the total damage there. According to the Qatari outlet Al Jazeera, seismologists have documented 4,700 aftershocks in the past week and a half, and they continue to occur even as rescuers continue to search for survivors.
The Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet reported the legal action in support of children on Thursday, in response to growing fears nationwide that vulnerable children will be taken in by unspecified cults or trafficked. The government of Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addressed the issue by publishing a statement clarifying that only the Turkish Ministry of Family and Social Policies is legally entitled to take in unaccompanied child earthquake victims. Any other organization claiming to be taking in children is, at best, suspect, the government affirmed.
According to a statement published by the Children and Women First Association, it had identified members of “religious sects” and other unauthorized institutions presenting themselves as relatives of unaccompanied children and taking them from shelters or other government areas.
https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2023/02/17/fears-child-trafficking-grow-turkey-earthquake-leaves-scores-orphans/