HORROR UPON HORROR

As cemeteries fill up and families wait for news, those who fled the bombardment from the air in Syria's civil war relive the grim ritual of digging through rubble

- Lorenzo Tondo and Deniz Barış, Ruth Michaelson, Husam Hezaber

At the Nurdağı cemetery in the Turkish province of Gaziantep, on the Syrian border, there will soon be no more room for the dead. The freshly dug graves are marked with blank headstones, with only pieces of ripped cloth from clothing to identify victims. The frayed ends of the cloth flutter slightly in the frigid air.

On the street outside, dozens of bodies lie piled on a row of pickup trucks, waiting to be buried. At least five imams have rushed to Nurdağı to officiate a rush of mass funerals, sometimes for as many as 10 victims at once. Officials brought in deliveries of coffins to provide a final resting place for the overwhelming numbers of corpses arriving in the town.

The death toll has continued to surge and towns across southern Turkey and northern Syria are scenes of apocalyptic destruction. “Forty per cent of the people who lived in this town could be gone,” said Sadık Güneş, an imam in Nurdağı. His home had been next to the mosque, which collapsed. “I’ve lost count of the bodies we’ve buried,” Güneş said. “We built an extension to the cemetery. There are still people under the debris. We will bury those ones too once they are recovered. We are burying the bodies even late at night with the help of citizens who come to help us.”

While awaiting the arrival of forensic doctors and prosecutors, the inhabitants of some cities in Turkey have piled bodies in stadiums or in car parks to give relatives an opportunity to quickly identify their loved ones before being issued a death certificate.