GRAPHIC WARNING: Some of the details in this article are graphic and may be disturbing.
Mohammad Ajmal Nikzad left Calgary on Feb. 6 to search for his family, who lives in devastated Turkish city of Kahramanmaraş.
The seven-storey building his mother and three siblings lived is in ruins.
“I couldn’t recognize it. I couldn’t find it. As soon as I saw the building, I said: ‘My family is gone,'” Nikzad said.
“I was going through a doomsday. I saw bodies with no heads, with no eyes… half of their face is gone.”
He found the bodies of his 23-year-old sister Sayeda Hashimi and his mother Najya.
The situation is so desperate, all Nikzad could do was stay with his sister’s remains until more places could be found to take the victims.
“Nobody helped me for six hours. I was on the street in the cold weather. My sister was in a bag, her dead body was there,” he said.
Nizkad walked for hours through the city searching for his brother and sister, who survived. His brother is now in a hospital in Ankara. Both his legs were amputated.
His surviving sister Sajia is in a hospital in the city of Kayseri, where he is now, some six hours away.
“She is in very bad condition. The doctor said her kidneys are failed and her lungs are not working very well and they cut her left leg off,” Nikzad said.
“I was sleeping on the streets. It was very cold. There is nothing. There’s no shelters. There were some schools I walked in, but there were dead bodies. I couldn’t sleep there,” Nikzad said.
Workers with Samaritan’s Purse have deployed a 52-bed Emergency Field Hospital near Antakya in southern Turkey. They are treating patients in the parking lot of a hospital that suffered severe damage and is no longer functional.
“It’s overwhelming,” said Melanie Wubs, hospital director of the Samaritan’s Purse Emergency Field Hospital.
“I’ve responded to disasters around the world but the scale of this one is just immense. Block after block and quite honestly, body after body. It’s overwhelming.”
Wubs said the field hospital allows people to be treated closer to home instead of being transported four hours away.
“In the last three-and-a-half hours since we’ve been open, we’ve seen over 45 patients,” said Wubs on Monday morning. “These are a mix of patients who suffered acute injury, some rescue workers working in the rubble, but also people who suffered injuries in the earthquake and have not been able to reach care before now.”
Nikzad found out that his sister’s leg had to amputated. He wonders how he can help the two siblings in cities so far apart. His thoughts are also with his wife and eight-year-old son back home in Calgary.
“Right now, I am the middle of nowhere. My family is living in Calgary, and I am here.”
The self-employed man installs floors and feels terrible for not being home now supporting his family in Calgary.
“I need help because I can’t leave these people here. I have to take them with me somehow. I can’t get to Calgary to support my family, so I don’t know what to do. I am lost,” Nikzad said.
“I’m absolutely lost. I am in shock.”
Nikzad said his family is originally from Afghanistan but moved to Turkey when his father was killed and his mother, who was a principal at a high school, received death threats.
“She came to Turkey to be safe. She had 6,000 students and she was fighting for girls to study,” Nikzad said.
“She would never let their school be closed until they killed my father out there too.”
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