Avalanche Death Toll Rises to 135

Avalanches killed more than 135 people in southeastern Turkey over the weekend, including 100 commandos posted in the rugged mountains along the Iraqi border, Turkish Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel said Sunday.

Figures given by Turkish state television indicated that the final death toll from several fatal avalanches might rise to more than 170, one of Turkey’s most devastating winter disasters.

Worst hit was the ethnic Kurdish village of Gormec, nine miles from the provincial capital of Sirnak. Half of its 40 houses, most of them built of stone with flat roofs, were buried by a wall of snow that killed at least 80 people, most of them Turkish commandos who lived in a concrete barracks above the settlement.

Villager Ali Ergen said he was buried in snow up to his neck.

“At 7. a.m. people were shoveling snow from the roofs of their houses. Suddenly there was a loud boom like a cannon shot, and it seemed like the whole mountain was coming down on us,” he told the semiofficial Anatolia news agency.

Turkish television showed exhausted soldiers and Kurdish villagers digging and tunneling with pickaxes, long-handled spades and sledgehammers to get into barracks crushed like matchboxes under tons of snow.

Outside rescue efforts were blocked for more than 24 hours by continued snowstorms, but the primitive methods used by the villagers and soldiers resulted in more than 70 survivors being dug out of buildings in Gormec and another badly hit village, Tunekpinar.

A soldier and four civilians survived for 30 hours in one room in Gormec, but the army said it fears dozens of other soldiers still missing on the icy mountainsides are already dead.

The frozen bodies of dozens of soldiers pulled out of the debris were covered with blankets and stacked in one of the few buildings still standing before being flown back to families.

“I cannot hide my sorrow,” said Demirel, who cut short a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to take charge of rescue efforts and speak words of comfort to the families of the bereaved.

Soldiers are concentrated in the southeast to fight separatist Kurdish guerrillas who are rapidly gaining power over the country’s 12 million Kurds, half of whom live in the southeast. At least one Turkish soldier said local villagers rescued him in Gormec, but bad blood is such that Turkish Chief of General Staff Dogan Gures had to issue a statement dismissing rumors that guerrillas set off the avalanches deliberately.

Blizzards of unusually thick, heavy snow blocked scores of roads all over the country, cutting off hundreds of villages. Hardest hit was the southeast, where snow brought down at least 70 power pylons and killed motorists stuck on high mountain passes and even a snowplow driver.

Villages in eastern Turkey are accustomed to being cut off during parts of the winter, and horse-drawn sleighs are still in use. But the avalanches, blizzards and disruption were extraordinary even by local standards.

Turkish Radio warned that worse might come, with another snow-laden cold front advancing on the region today.

Aircraft from the big U.S. air base at Incirlik went into action Sunday, bringing combat rations, medicine and rescue teams to the area.

U.S. helicopters lifted 17 casualties out of Gormec to the regional capital of Diyarbakir, a statement from the Incirlik base said. The aircraft are part of the Operation Provide Comfort force set up by allied forces last April to protect Iraqi Kurds displaced after the collapse of their post-Gulf War revolt.