Istanbul, Turkey

It’s Monday morning and Sam is late to work. The cafe he owns in a quiet residential area of Istanbul is already busy with émigré Russian IT workers tapping away at their laptops and small groups of locals scrolling through the news on their phones in silence. ‘This earthquake,’ he says, walking around the counter and burying his face in his hands. ‘My best friend from back home is trapped under the rubble.’

Sam is from a city near Gaziantep in the south of the country where, just hours earlier, a colossal 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck, destroying around 6,000 buildings across ten separate regions and leaving tens of thousands of people buried in the ruins of their own homes. At 4am, almost everyone was in bed and few had any chance to get out. Now, six days on, more than 28,000 people are confirmed to have been killed and the death toll is still rising as rescuers sift through entire neighbourhoods reduced to smashed concrete and twisted metal.

Videos of a newborn baby pulled from the rubble and a photograph of a man holding the hand of his 15-year old daughter, who died while pinned under a concrete slab, have been shared around the world. However, on Turkish social media, it is clips of brand new apartment blocks, marketed as ‘earthquake proof,’ crumbling into dust that have sparked the strongest feelings, and shock and grief is turning to anger.

‘My friend is a civil engineer,’ says Sam. ‘It’s such a sick irony that an engineer is trapped because he lives in a building that hasn’t been constructed properly.’

‘Many of the collapsed buildings appear to have been built from concrete without adequate seismic reinforcement,’ says Mark Quigley, an associate professor of earthquake science at the University of Melbourne. ‘Building codes in this region suggest these buildings should be able to sustain strong earthquakes without incurring this type of complete failure.’ And yet, even miles away from the epicentre, whole cities have been flattened, and entire families killed as the floors above them collapsed downwards.

In 2011, more than 570 people died in another, far smaller earthquake in the east of the country. In the aftermath, then-Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan blamed ‘bad quality’ building materials and said that local officials and construction companies had not done enough to learn from past mistakes, arguing their ‘negligence amounted to murder.’ Now, after almost a decade in office as his country’s president, Erdoğan is himself facing criticism for not doing enough to protect people living in known earthquake hotspots, despite seismologists warning for years that a major quake was on the cards.

‘Such things have always happened. It’s part of destiny’s plan,’ Erdoğan said on a visit to the disaster zone, insisting there was nothing more to the chaos than an act of god, while admitting rescue operations were initially not as fast as they should have been. He has resolved to build new homes for all those living in buildings that are now uninhabitable. The Turkish authorities have now made several arrests, including detaining one of the contractors responsible for building luxury developments in Hatay, one of the provinces worst affected by the earthquake.

However, this has seemingly done little to put the public at ease. With frustrations growing over what critics say was a delayed response to a preventable disaster, Twitter was blocked for many users across Turkey on Wednesday as officials sought to dampen tensions and halt the spread of alleged ‘misinformation.’ Service was later restored.

Now, even one of the country’s most eminent civil engineers, Professor Mustafa Erdik of Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University has blamed building standards and shoddy craftsmanship. ‘We allow for damage but not this type of damage – with floors being piled on top of each other like pancakes,’ he told the BBC on Saturday. ‘That should have been prevented and that creates the kind of casualties we have seen.’

The row comes at the worst possible time for Erdoğan, who is seeking re-election for an unprecedented third term in office and will face a public ballot in May. His party, the governing AKP, has already seen its popularity crater in major cities amid a worsening economic crisis and his refusal to tackle runaway inflation rates of more than 80 per cent  by raising interest rates, which he has described as ‘un-Islamic.’ Now, voters will be asked to decide whether they still trust him after a decade in power at the very moment they are wondering if they are safe in their own homes.

While the crisis opens Erdoğan up to awkward questions, it is being used as a political opportunity for another leader. Just across the border in Syria, where as many as 5.3 million people are believed to have been made homeless by the earthquake, the government of Bashar al-Assad is capitalising on calls for western sanctions against his regime to be dropped, claiming they are hindering relief efforts. With aid shipments held up by the fact the country is still consumed by a raging civil war, the US on Friday agreed to ease restrictions for six months to help supplies get through.

At the same time, Assad is accused of cynically bombing quake-ravaged areas held by Turkish-backed rebels, even as locals dug through the rubble with their bare hands to rescue loved ones. ‘It is these same opposition-held communities from whom Assad has been stealing medicines and aid,’ said Alicia Kearns, a Conservative MP and Chair of the House of Commons’ Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Now, there are fears that the Russian-backed government – which has long shown a disregard for the lives of its citizens – will leverage the disaster to strengthen its hand in the north of the country, while Turkey is distracted with its own humanitarian catastrophe.

As hopes fade of finding many more survivors beneath the shattered remains of their homes, the tectonic plates underneath Turkey and Syria are still shifting. For Erdoğan and Assad, the race is on to be on the right side of them.