It came in the dead of night, an earthquake of 7.8 magnitude that hit southeastern Turkey and northern Syria. Its epicentre was close to Gaziantep — Unesco Creative City of Gastronomy, famous for its diverse cuisine and sweet pistachio pastries, home to the world’s largest mosaic museum with a mesmerising collection from the ancient settlement of Zeugma. The shaking was so powerful that it was caught by seismometers all over the world. By the time it was over, it had flattened whole apartment blocks, ripped up roads and trapped thousands of people under piles of concrete.
Nine hours later, a second potent earthquake hit the same region, its epicentre near the city of Kahramanmaraş. At 7.5 magnitude, it was almost as traumatic as the first one. In freezing winter conditions, people were left homeless and helpless, with no food and no water. Even the ones who were pulled from under the rubble in the early hours of the tragedy were faced with the possibility of freezing to death. This was a natural disaster of vast proportions. But what made it so deadly and the suffering so immense was not nature itself. It was human-built systems of inequality and corruption.