A lucky few are still being pulled alive from the rubble: two teenage sisters were rescued from debris in Kahramanmaraş city 101 hours after the massive earthquake hit Turkey.

Ayfer, 15, was rescued in the 99th hour after the quake, as rescuers calmed her by playing her music and promising her ice cream. Her sister, Fatma, 13, was saved two hours later in a 10-hour rescue operation after seismic sensors detected signs of life under the debris.

And on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, five days – approximately 102 hours – after the 7.8-magnitude quake struck, rescue workers managed to pull out a family of six, including two parents and their four children, from their collapsed first floor home in the city of Iskenderun.

But more than four days on, and as temperatures plummet in both countries, hopes of finding loved ones are dimming, and the reality of grief and shock is setting in for the thousands left displaced across both countries.

Warnings of ‘catastrophe on top of catastrophe’

Although they could be considered the lucky ones, a grim reality is setting in for those left alive.

Survivors could face “a secondary disaster” as cold and snow lead to “worsening and horrific conditions,” the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned Thursday, as affected areas in both countries face colder than normal temperatures. For example, the Syrian city of Aleppo is forecast to have lows of -3°C to -2°C (27°F to 28°F) through this weekend, whereas February lows are normally 2.5°C (36°F).

Speaking at a press conference in Geneva, WHO incident response manager Robert Holden warned there were “a lot of people” surviving “out in the open, in worsening and horrific conditions.”

“We’ve got major disruptions to basic water supplies, we’ve got major disruption to fuel, electricity supplies, communication supplies, the basics of life,” Holden said.

“We are in real danger of seeing a secondary disaster which may cause harm to more people than the initial disaster if we don’t move with the same pace and intensity as we are doing on the search and rescue side,” Holden added.

Relatives of Syrians killed in the earthquake in Turkey, receive their bodies following their repatriation though the Syrian opposition-held crossing of Bab al-Salama, at the border with Turkey in the northern Aleppo province, on February 10, 2023.-/AFP/Getty Images

United Nations trucks full of humanitarian aid enter Idlib, Syria, through the Bab al-Hawa Border Gate. Izzeddin Kasim/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

In Syria, the earthquake’s devastation is heaping misery on top of an existing humanitarian crisis resulting from a more than decade-long civil war.

The delivery of urgent supplies to the country’s quake-hit northern areas has been complicated by a long-running civil war between opposition forces and the Syrian government, led by President Bashar al-Assad, who is accused of killing his own people.

Many Western nations have refused to send aid directly to the Syrian regime, which is under US and EU sanctions, and Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad says any aid it receives must go through the capital Damascus, leaving rebel-held areas reliant on aid groups including the UN.

Millions living in northwest Syria, much of which is controlled by anti-government rebels, were already suffering from the effects of extreme poverty and a cholera outbreak when the quake hit. Now, they are left fending for themselves, with the first UN aid convoy from Turkey into northwestern Syria arriving Thursday, days after the initial quake, followed by a second on Friday, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

In the past aid was brought into northwest Syria through Turkey from Bab al-Hawa crossing – the only point of entry authorized by the UN Security Council. A resolution proposing more border openings between Turkey and Syria was vetoed by Russia and China.

The other path in was through “crosslines,” aid coming in from Syrian government territory into the rebel-held northwest.

The World Food Programme (WFP) is calling for more access to Syrian territories impacted to replenish aid supplies that have been exhausted, with the organization’s executive director calling the situation in the northwest of the country “catastrophe on top of catastrophe.”

“The one crossing authorized by the Security Council has been re-opened, but damage to roads and slowed customs clearances are significantly hampering movement,” World Food Programme executive director David Beasley told CNN.

“What stocks we have are being exhausted quickly, especially the ready to eat rations, and they need to be replenished quickly. To do this, we need access,” Beasley added.

Source: Cable News Network

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A second convoy of aid trucks has crossed into stricken north-western Syria from Turkey, as rescuers continued to pull survivors – including a newborn baby – from the rubble 100 hours after an earthquake that has killed more than 23,000 people.

Hundreds of thousands more people have been left homeless and short of food in often sub-zero winter conditions after 7.8- and 7.6-magnitude quakes struck within hours of each other on Monday. Dozens of countries have pledged help and sent emergency teams.

In Samandağ in Turkey’s southern Hatay province, a 10-day-old boy named Yagiz was retrieved from a ruined building overnight, while in Kırıkhan, German rescuers pulled 40-year-old Zeynep Kahraman alive out of the rubble more than 104 hours after she was buried and carried her to a waiting ambulance.

“Now I believe in miracles,” Steven Bayer, the International Search and Rescue team leader, said at the site. “You can see the people crying and hugging each other. It’s such a huge relief that this woman under such conditions came out so fit. It’s an absolute miracle.”

A 10-year-old boy was also saved overnight with his mother in the Samandağ district of Hatay after being trapped for more than 90 hours, while in Diyarbakır in the east, 32-year-old Sebahat Varlı and her son, Serhat, were pulled out alive 100 hours after the first quake.

Hopes were fading, however, that many more people would be found alive. Barely 6% of earthquake victims who have not been rescued within five days survive, experts say, compared with 74% after 24 hours. The freezing conditions are likely to significantly reduce survival expectancy.

In the Syrian town of Jindires, a Reuters reporter spoke to Naser al-Wakaa, sobbing as he sat on the pile of rubble and twisted metal that had been his family’s home and burying his face in the baby clothes that had belonged to one of his children.

“Bilal, oh Bilal,” he said, shouting the name of one of his dead children.

Rabie Jundiya, a rescue worker in Jindires, said: “The civil defence teams will not withdraw … until the last corpse is recovered from under the rubble.”

In Gaziantep, Turkey, where the temperature was -3C (26.6F) on Friday morning, thousands of families spend the night in cars or makeshift tents, unable to return to damaged or destroyed homes. “I fear for anyone trapped under the rubble in this,” Melek Halıcı told Agence France-Presse, holding her two-year-old daughter in a blanket.

The International Organization for Migration said on Friday the 14 aid trucks bound for north-west Syria were carrying desperately needed heaters, tents, blankets and other supplies. This is an area where civil war has left 90% of the population – about 4 million people – relying on aid even before the quakes struck.

The lorries, heading for Idlib, followed a convoy of six UN trucks that crossed the only border crossing open on Thursday, at Bab al-Hawa. The World Food Programme said on Friday that it was fast running out of stocks in the area and called for more crossings to be opened.

Turkey and Syria broke off diplomatic ties more than a decade ago, but Turkish officials have said the country was considering reopening a crossing into Syrian government-held territory, plus a second into the rebel-held north-west.

Officials and medics said 20,213 people had died in Turkey and 3,553 in Syria. The confirmed total now stands at 23,766.

Experts have said the toll is expected to continue climbing for some time yet since most people were asleep in their flats when the first quake struck, and whole districts in some towns have been reduced to rubble. The UN has estimated 24.4 million people have been affected in Syria and Turkey.

The death toll from the quake has surpassed the more than 17,000 killed in 1999 in an earthquake in north-west Turkey, and the disaster ranks as the seventh deadliest this century, higher than Japan’s 2011 tremor and tsunami.

The US has offered an $85m (£70.3m) aid package that it said would go on delivering “urgently needed aid for millions of people”, including through food, shelter and emergency health services as well as support for safe drinking water and sanitation.

The World Bank has said it would give $1.78bn in aid to Turkey. Top aid officials are planning to visit affected areas, with Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization head, and UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths both planning trips.

The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, made his first reported trip to affected areas since the quake on Friday while his Turkish counterpart toured his country’s stricken south amid continuing criticism of the state’s disaster response.

Speaking in Adıyaman province, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, conceded that the Turkish authorities’ response to the quake was not moving as fast as the government wanted. He said some people were stealing from markets and attacking businesses.

The disaster has cast doubt on whether Turkey’s 14 May election will go ahead as planned. The government’s response to the quake, widely criticised as slow and inadequate, is likely to prove a significant factor if and when the vote, expected to be the tightest for Erdoğan since he came to power in 2014, does go ahead.

Amid opposition claims that the government’s “lack of coordination, lack of planning and incompetence” was as big a disaster as the quake itself, the president has called for solidarity and condemned what he described as “negative campaigns for political interest”.

The Syrian government, which is under heavy western sanctions, has appealed for UN aid, but insisted it must be delivered through Damascus and not directly to rebel-held areas. Assad visted a hospital in Aleppo on Friday.

Source: The Guardian

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