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Turkey: The Nurdağı graveyard in the Turkish province of Gaziantep —on the Syrian border — will soon be full. The new graves are marked with blank headstones, with only pieces of ripped cloth gathered from the victims’ clothing to identify them. 

Outside, hundreds of bodies are piled on top of one another in pickup trucks, waiting for their last destination. At least five imams went to Nurdağı to continue with mass funerals, sometimes ten victims at once. Officials brought in deliveries of coffins from neighboring villages and as far as Istanbul to offer a final resting place for the growing numbers of corpses arriving in the town.

Five days after two powerful earthquakes hit southern Turkey in the country’s most menacing natural disaster in a generation, the death toll has skyrocketed above 21,000. Nurdağı and towns across southern Turkey and northern Syria are scenes of final day levels of destruction.

“Forty percent of the people who lived in this town could be gone,” said Sadık Güneş, an imam in Nurdağı. His home is situated next to the ramshackle mosque. Without a place for their prayers, mass funerals in Nurdağı and the rest of southern Turkey are being held outdoors.

“I’ve lost count of the bodies we’ve buried since Monday,” Güneş said. “We built an extension to the cemetery. There are still people under the debris. We will bury those ones too once they are recovered. We are burying the bodies even late at night with the help of citizens who come to help us.”

In Kahramanmaraş, emergency workers combed the wreckage, frequently uncovering only some body parts. One emergency worker described how she had tried to identify a severed arm, showing it to bereaved families in the hope of using the color of the remaining nail polish to identify the deceased.