“Merve! Irem! Merve! Irem,” rescue worker Mustafa Ozturk is shouting. Everyone around us has been ordered to be silent. The team are looking for two sisters who other survivors say are trapped alive under piles of rubble.

With sensitive devices they listen for any response. Everyone is frozen in anticipation.

And then, a breakthrough. “Irem, my dear, I am close to you, you hear me, yes?” Mustafa says.

Those of us watching can’t hear it, but it is clear now that she is responding. A small group of the girls’ friends wait silently with us.

“You are superb! Now you stay calm and answer me. Ah ok, that’s Merve. Merve dear, just answer my questions,” he says.

Merve, 24, and her sister Irem, 19, were trapped under the rubble of their five-storey apartment block in Antakya, southern Turkey, which was flattened by the earthquake. It had been two days, but for them those days felt like weeks.

“It’s Wednesday. No! You weren’t trapped for 14 days. Give us five minutes. You will be out.”

Mustafa knows it will take hours, but tells us: “If they lose their hope they might not survive.”

Merve and Irem start to joke and laugh together. I can see a big smile on Mustafa’s face: “If they had space they would probably dance,” he says.

By the rescuers’ calculations it is 2m (6.6 ft) to reach the sisters but Hasan Binay, the rescue team’s commander, says digging a tunnel into the concrete is a very delicate operation. One wrong move could lead to a catastrophe.

A bulldozer is called to very slightly lift and hold the thick concrete to stop the building collapsing when they start digging.

“Girls, soon we will give you blankets.” Mustafa tells the sisters. “Ah no, you don’t worry about us. We are not tired or cold.”

Mustafa says Merve is worried about the rescuers’ situation. It is 20:30 local time and it is very cold. This area has had one of the coldest winters that people can remember.

The rescuers start furiously digging and throwing the rubble away with their bare hands.

But after a couple of hours we feel the ground suddenly shaking under our feet. It is a strong aftershock. Operations must stop and we leave the devastated building.

“There is a brutal reality here. The safety of our team comes first,” Hasan says.

After 30 minutes, Mustafa and three other rescuers go back to where they were digging.

“Don’t be scared. Believe me we won’t leave you here. I will bring you out and you will take us for a good lunch,” Mustafa shouts. The girls thought they had been left to die.

It is midnight now and the digging has resumed. The team have hardly slept for days. We have gathered around a small fire next to the building.

Every so often there is a shout: “sessizlik”, meaning silence. The light goes off, total darkness now. They have made a small hole in the concrete to see if the girls can see the light coming from Mustafa’s torch.

“Merve! Irem! Do you see the light? OK! Perfect! Now I am sending a small camera down. Once you see it tell me and I will tell you what to do.”

It is a moment of elation for everyone. Hasan joins his team to see the girls on the small screen connected to their night vision camera. They can see both Irem and Merve.

“You are so beautiful. Don’t move too much. Irem pull the camera so we can see Merve better.”

On the screen, we see that Irem is smiling. Luckily there is enough space for them between the concrete trapping them.

Relief floods everyone’s faces. The girls look well and at least Irem has room to pull herself out if they make the hole bigger.

But almost immediately the team look concerned. Merve has told them that she has started to feel cold and there is something heavy on her feet.

The medics were worried: “Do Merve’s feet have gangrene? Or is this the first symptom of hypothermia?”

It is around 05:00 now. The tunnel is big enough for the slimmest team member to crawl down. The rescuer was able to reach and hold Irem’s hand for a few moments.

“Our mother’s body has started to stink and we can’t breathe properly,” Irem tells the rescuers. The girls have been lying next to their dead mother for days.

It is shocking. How awful that there can be moments in life when you would not want your mother next to you, we reflected.

Hasan asks one of Merve’s friends – still waiting, stressed and silent – to show them the picture she has of the girls. They are trying to estimate the width they need to make the hole. The two girls are smiling, in party dresses, celebrating a wedding.

“Perfect! We can bring them out.” The medical team gets ready with thermal blankets and stretchers. Everyone is excited. It is 06:30 and Irem comes first. She is laughing and crying at the same time.

“God bless you. Please bring Merve out too. Please,” she begs the rescuers. “Merve will follow. I promise,” Hasan tells her.

But bringing Merve out takes another tense 30 minutes. They need to free her feet from under the concrete without doing her harm. The operation is successful.

Once Merve is out, everyone starts clapping and cheering. I hear Merve screaming in pain but then asking: “Am I really alive?”

“You are dear,” Mustafa replies, smiling.

The friends who have been here all night start shouting in tears. “Merve! Irem! We are here. Don’t be scared.” The sisters were loaded into ambulances and transferred to a field hospital.

After this joyful moment comes a chilling one. The rescuers ask everyone to be silent again. This is the last call.

“If anyone hears me, respond. If you can’t respond, try to touch the ground.”

Hasan repeats, imploringly, from different angles. Then sadly, with red spray he signs on the concrete, writing codes so other rescue teams will not search the building.

“Rescuing a human being is a beautiful feeling, but we wish there were no deaths.” I can see the sadness in his face.

“Will you eat lunch with Merve and Irem?” I ask. He smiles: “I hope one day we can. But the most important thing is that they are alive and in good hands now.”

Source : BBC

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These earthquake survivors were among more than a dozen people pulled out of the rubble alive Friday after spending over four days trapped in frigid darkness following the disaster that struck Turkey and Syria.

The unlikely rescues, coming so long after Monday’s 7.8-magnitude quake brought down thousands of buildings, offered fleeting moments of joy amid a catastrophe that has killed nearly 24,000 people, injured at least 80,000 others and left millions homeless.

In the Mediterranean coastal city of Iskenderun, a crowd chanted “God is great!” as Haci Murat Kilinc and his wife, Raziye, were carried on stretchers to a waiting ambulance.

“You’ve been working so many hours, God bless you!” a relative of the couple told one of their saviors.

One rescue worker said that Kilinc had been joking with crew members while still trapped beneath the rubble, trying to boost their morale.

Two hours earlier in Kahramanmaras, the city closest to the epicenter, rescuers embraced and chanted their thanks to God after pulling a man from his collapsed home.

In Adiyaman, a hard-hit city of more than a quarter-million people, rescuers and onlookers suppressed their joy so as not to frighten 4-year-old Yagiz Komsu as he emerged from the debris, according the HaberTurk television, which broadcast the rescue live.

To distract him, he was given a jelly bean. Teams later rescued his 27-year-old mother, Ayfer Komsu, who had a broken rib.

But the flurry of dramatic rescues could not obscure the devastation spread across a sprawling border region that is home to more than 13.5 million people. Entire neighborhoods of high-rises have been reduced to rubble, and the quake has already killed more people than Japan’s Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, with many more bodies yet to be recovered and counted.

Relatives wept and chanted as rescuers pulled 17-year-old Adnan Muhammed Korkut from a basement in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, near the quake’s epicenter. He had been trapped for 94 hours, forced to drink his own urine to survive.

“Thank God you arrived,” he said, embracing his mother and others who leaned down to kiss and hug him as he was being loaded into an ambulance.

For one of the rescuers, identified only as Yasemin, Adnan’s survival hit home hard.

“I have a son just like you,” she told him after giving him a warm hug. “I swear to you, I have not slept for four days. … I was trying to get you out.”

Elsewhere, HaberTurk television said rescuers had identified nine people trapped inside the remains of a high-rise apartment block in Iskenderun and pulled out six of them, including a woman who waved at onlookers as she was being carried away on a stretcher. The crowd shouted “God is great!” after she was brought out.

The building was only 600 feet (200 meters) from the Mediterranean Sea and narrowly avoided being flooded when the massive earthquake sent water surging into the city center.

Video of another rescue effort in Kahramanmaras showed an emergency worker playing a pop song on his smartphone to distract the two teenage sisters as they waited to be freed.

There were still more stories: A German team said it worked for more than 50 hours to free a woman from a collapsed house in Kirikhan. And a trapped woman could be heard speaking to a team trying to dig her out in video broadcast by HaberTurk television. She told her would-be rescuers that she had given up hope of being found — and prayed to be put to sleep because she was so cold. The station did not say where the operation was taking place.

Even though experts say trapped people can live for a week or more, the odds of finding more survivors were quickly waning.

Death loomed everywhere: Morgues and cemeteries were overwhelmed, and bodies wrapped in blankets, rugs and tarps lay in the streets of some cities.

Temperatures remained below freezing across the large region, and many people have no shelter. The Turkish government has distributed millions of hot meals, as well as tents and blankets, but was still struggling to reach many people in need.

The disaster compounded suffering in a region beset by Syria’s 12-year civil war, which has displaced millions of people within the country and left them dependent on aid. The fighting sent millions more to seek refuge in Turkey.

The conflict has isolated many areas of Syria and complicated efforts to get aid in. The United Nations said the first earthquake-related aid convoy crossed from Turkey into northwestern Syria on Friday — a day after an aid shipment planned before the disaster arrived.

The U.N. refugee agency estimated that as many as 5.3 million people have been left homeless in Syria. Sivanka Dhanapala, the country representative in Syria for UNHCR, told reporters Friday that the agency is focusing on providing tents, plastic sheeting, thermal blankets, sleeping mats and winter clothing.

Syrian President Bashar Assad and his wife, Asmaa, visited survivors at the Aleppo University Hospital, according to Syrian state media. It was the leader’s first public appearance in an affected area of the country since the disaster. He then visited rescuers in one of the city’s hardest-hit areas.

Aleppo has been scarred by years of heavy bombardment and shelling — much of it by the forces of Assad and his ally, Russia — and it was among the cities most devastated by the earthquake.

The Syrian government also announced that it will allow aid to reach all parts of the country, including areas held by insurgent groups in the northwest.

Also Friday, the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, declared a cease-fire in its separatist insurgency in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast, including some areas affected by the quake.

Turkey’s disaster-management agency said more than 20,200 people had been confirmed killed in the disaster so far in Turkey, with more than 80,000 injured.

More than 3,500 have been confirmed killed in Syria, bringing the total number of dead to nearly 24,000.

Some 12,000 buildings in Turkey have either collapsed or sustained serious damage, according to Turkey’s minister of environment and urban planning, Murat Kurum. Turkey’s vice president, Fuat Oktay, said more than 1 million people were being housed in temporary shelters.

Engineers suggested that the scale of the devastation was partly explained by lax enforcement of building codes.

___

Alsayed reported from Bab al-Hawa, Syria. Bilginsoy reported from Istanbul. Associated Press journalists Robert Badendieck in Istanbul; Mehmet Guzel in Antakya, Turkey; Emrah Gurel and Yakup Paksoy in Adiyaman, Turkey; Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey; Bassem Mroue and Abby Sewell in Beirut; Salar Salim in Erbil, Iraq; Hogir al-Abdo in Manbij, Syria; and David Rising in Bangkok contributed to this report.

Source: Associated Press

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