Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced $100 million in disaster assistance during his visit to Turkey. “Search and rescue, unfortunately, is coming to an end,” he said. “The recovery operation is on, and then there’ll be a massive rebuilding effort.”
, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, already under fire for the country’s economic downturn and facing parliamentary and presidential elections in May.
Turkish officials have tried to demonstrate action on the problem, detaining or putting out arrest warrants for roughly 130 peopleBlinken’s first visit to Turkey, coming more than two years after President Biden was sworn into office, demonstrates the troubled nature of the relationship between Washington and Ankara.by his latest decision to hold up Sweden’s and Finland’s applications to join NATO over their alleged support for Kurdish groups Turkey considers terrorists.
“Nobody’s expecting Turkey to ratify membership for Finland or Sweden at this stage because the government’s bandwidth for foreign policy has shrunk significantly,” said Soner Cagaptay, a Turkey scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. But the emergency assistance from U.S. and European allies have improved those countries’ standing in Turkey, Cagaptay said. “Turkish citizens have realized from the outpouring of support that Turkey’s closest friends are still in the West.”During his helicopter ride, the damage Blinken surveyed was extensive. The quake collapsed entire neighborhoods, with roofs, shattered windows and demolished walls creating heaps of wreckage that fill the streets and walkways.
“Our colleagues have flown something like 150 sorties,” Blinken said as military personnel stacked boxes of supplies that will be shipped to damage sites. “They’ve gotten helicopters out over hard-to-reach areas — 24 million pounds of assistance is coming through this place, and as you can see, it’s moving right on to the trucks behind me and it will move in to people who need it.”
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