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.

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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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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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