“He Never Left The Hand Of His Daughter Who Died In The Earthquake”

Irmak is just one of a horrifyingly large number of people killed by Monday’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake, which has devastated large swaths of Turkey and neighboring Syria.

More than 20,000 people are known to have died, according to tallies from the Associated Press on Thursday, making the disaster one of the deadliest of the last decade. 

There are few more traumatized corners of the globe that the quake could have struck than Syria’s northwest. 

That country, plagued for more than a decade by a civil war that has wrought devastation and triggered a global refugee crisis, already had 15 million people in need of humanitarian aid even before the tremor began, according to David Miliband, president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee.

“One of the deadliest earthquakes this century, followed by hundreds of aftershocks, now adds to a litany of devastation,” Miliband said in a statement shared with BuzzFeed News, calling for aid to begin “skyrocketing” in order to meet the desperate need.