Rescuers in Turkey cheer as more earthquake survivors emerge from the rubble

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Iskenderun, Turkey –

Six relatives huddle in a small pocket of air, day in and day out. A desperate teenager grew so thirsty that he drank his own urine. Two terrified sisters are comforted by the pop song as they wait for rescuers to release them.

Those quake survivors were among more than a dozen people pulled alive on Friday from the rubble after spending more than four days trapped in pitch darkness after the catastrophe in Turkey and Syria.

The unexpected rescues, which came after Monday’s 7.8-magnitude earthquake that destroyed thousands of buildings, provided fleeting moments of joy amid a disaster that has killed nearly 24,000 people – according to the latest official toll – and injured at least 80,000. people and displace millions.

In the Mediterranean port city of Iskenderun, a crowd chanted “God is great!” Hassi Mourad Kling and his wife, Radia, were also taken on stretchers to a waiting ambulance.

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

One rescue worker said that Kilink was joking with crew members while he was still trapped under the rubble, in an attempt to raise their spirits.

Two hours ago in Kahramanmaras, one of the cities closest to the epicenter, rescuers hugged and chanted their thanks to God after they pulled a man out of his collapsed house.

In Adiyaman, a hard-hit city of more than a quarter of a million people, rescuers and onlookers suppressed their joy so as not to scare 4-year-old Yagiz Kumsu when he emerged from the rubble, according to HaberTurk TV, which broadcast the TV channel. live rescue.

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

But the wave of dramatic bailouts cannot obscure the devastation spread across a sprawling border region home to more than 13.5 million people. Whole neighborhoods of high-rises have been reduced to rubble, and the earthquake has already killed more people than Japan’s Fukushima earthquake and tsunami in 2011, with many more bodies yet to be recovered and counted.

Relatives wept and cheered as rescuers pulled 17-year-old Adnan Mehmet Korkut from a basement in Gaziantep, another major city near the epicenter. He had been trapped for 94 hours, forced to drink his own urine in order to survive.

“Thank God I have arrived,” he said, hugging his mother and others who bent down to kiss and cuddle him as he was being loaded into an ambulance.

For one of the rescuers, identified only as Yasmin, Adnan escaped from his home.

She said to him after hugging him warmly: “I have a son like you.” “I swear I haven’t slept in four days….I was trying to get you out.”

Elsewhere, HaberTurk TV said rescuers identified nine people trapped inside the rubble of a high-rise apartment building in Iskenderun and pulled out six of them, including a woman who waved to onlookers as she was being carried away on a stretcher. The crowd shouted “Allahu Akbar!” after it was taken out.

The building was only 600 feet from the Mediterranean Sea and flooding was narrowly avoided when a massive earthquake sent water rushing into the city centre.

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

There are still more stories to come: A German team said it worked for more than 50 hours to free a woman from a collapsed house in Kerekhan. A trapped woman can be heard speaking to a team trying to extract her in a video broadcast by HaberTurk TV. She told would-be rescuers that she had given up hope of ever being found – and prayed she would go to sleep because it was so cold. The station did not mention the location of the operation.

Although experts say trapped people can live for a week or more, the odds of finding more survivors are long.

Turkish rescue workers carry Eyup Ak, 60, to an ambulance after he was pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building in Adiyaman on Friday.

(Emrah Gurel / Associated Press)

Death loomed everywhere: corpses and cemeteries were flooded, and corpses were wrapped in blankets, rugs, and drapery on the streets of some towns.

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

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

The conflict has isolated many areas of Syria and complicated aid delivery efforts. The United Nations said the first quake-related aid convoy crossed from Turkey into northwestern Syria on Friday – a day after an aid shipment scheduled before the disaster arrived.

The United Nations refugee agency has estimated that up to 5.3 million people are left homeless in Syria. Sivanka Dhanapala, UNHCR’s representative in Syria, told reporters on Friday that UNHCR was focusing on providing tents, plastic sheeting, thermal blankets, sleeping mats and winter clothes.

Syrian state media reported that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his wife, Asma, visited survivors at Aleppo University Hospital. It was the leader’s first public appearance in an affected part of the country since the disaster. Then he visited rescuers in one of the worst-hit areas of the city.

Aleppo bore the scars of years of heavy bombing and shelling – much of it by the forces of Assad and his ally Russia – and was among the cities hardest hit by the earthquake.

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

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

Turkey’s disaster management agency said more than 20,200 people have been confirmed dead in the disaster so far in Turkey, and more than 80,000 people have been injured.

More than 3,500 people have been confirmed dead in Syria, bringing the official total death toll to 23,700.

Turkish Minister of Environment and Urban Planning Murat Corum said that about 12,000 buildings in Turkey either collapsed or suffered severe damage. Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay said more than a million people are staying in temporary shelters.

Engineers suggested that the extent of the damage was partly the result of lax enforcement of building codes.

Al-Sayyid narrated from Bab al-Hawa in Syria. Belgensoy reported from Istanbul. Associated Press journalists Robert Badendijk in Istanbul; Mehmet Guzel in Antakya, Turkey; Emrah Gurel and Yakup Paksoy in Adiyaman, Turkey; Susan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey; Basem Marwa and Abby Sewell in Beirut. Salar Saleem in Erbil, Iraq; Hajeer al-Abdah in Manbij, Syria. David Rising in Bangkok contributed to this report.

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