Hey everyone, this is David Green. I'm the co-founder of Fearless Media and your host here on left-right and center.

This week, as many of us know, a massive earthquake hit Turkey and Syria.

More than 20,000 people are confirmed dead at this point and tens of thousands have been injured.

This was a 7.8 quake, which is considered major and it was particularly deadly due to the timing.

It was early in the morning when a lot of people were sleeping.

Another big factor was just the lack of sturdiness of so many buildings in this region not built to withstand something like this.

This is the strongest quake to hit this region in over a century.

This is also a region, of course, that has been torn apart by war.

In rebel-controlled areas of northern Syria, hospitals were badly damaged and so millions of people already displaced by the war and neglected by the Assad regime are suffering with little or no way to get help.

So, what can the world do here?

The Syrian regime's relationship with countries like the United States, frozen, so what is the moral responsibility and what risks should NGOs be taking to try and reach people to make sure that their human rights are being respected in this horrible moment and to make sure their government is helping them.

To talk about that, we have Kemal Karishi, a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, is also author of the book Turkey and the West fault lines in a troubled alliance, also a retired professor who was worked on refugee related issues since the 1980s.

Kemal, thank you for taking some time to talk us through this crisis.

Thank you.

I know you're in touch with a lot of people in the region hit by the earthquake. Just tell us what is standing out to you in terms of the suffering that we're seeing here.

I think as you pointed out, this is a very unusual earthquake.

I heard somebody saying that it has provoked a biblical scene. I would say more of an apocalyptic paysage that reveals itself in itself after Ma.

I just to give you some idea, on social media, I saw a professor of geophysics saying that the Anatolian peninsula has moved about three meters to the southwest of the country.

The country is crisscrossed by three major fault lines, one bearing the weight of the Arabian peninsula, the other one the Euro-Asian mess, and then there is the smaller Anatolian fault line, and the three of them kind of amount stress on each other.

As you pointed out, it was back in the 1930s, to the north of where the earthquakes took place, a major earthquake of Erzincan had occurred.

I suspect this is why people are referring to this century point of reference, but it wasn't in the 1500s that the last major earthquake had taken place in the area where these two earthquakes occurred.

So you can imagine the amount of stress that would have built on this particular fault line.

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