Survivors are still being pulled from the rubble 11 days after Turkey’s earthquake, but some in rebel-held Syria have ‘no hope left’

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Rescuers pulled a child, a woman and two men alive from the rubble of buildings in Turkey some 11 days after the devastating earthquakes hit the region. The massive 7.8-magnitude earthquake and another strong earthquake nine hours later destroyed thousands of buildings in southern Turkey and northern Syria, killing more than 41,000 people.

In many places, rescue efforts have given way to recovery efforts, but remarkable stories of survival continue to emerge from the rubble.

The latest attack came overnight when rubble-clearing crews in southern Turkey pulled Neslihan Kilic, a 29-year-old mother, from the rubble in the stricken city of Kahramanmaras. The Dubai Health Authority’s independent news agency reported that it had been trapped for 258 hours. Then in Antakya, the police found a 12-year-old boy alive in the rubble from which they also recovered 17 bodies. “Just when our hopes were over, we reached our brother Osman at 260,” police rescue team leader Okan Tosun was quoted by the Associated Press as saying. Then, just an hour later, workers managed to reach two men under the collapsed rubble of a collapsed hospital in Antakya.

Man rescued from rubble more than 261 hours after earthquake Turkey 01:16

Mustafa Afci, one of those men, asked the rescuers if he could borrow a cell phone right after he walked out, still covered in dust.

He immediately called his brother to ask about the other family members.

“Did they all survive?” He can be heard asking in the video capture by news crews. “Let me hear their voices.”

His wife gave birth to their child hours before the earthquakes, and she and her child managed to escape unharmed from the hospital they were in, which was destroyed by the earthquakes.

Mustafa Avcı, a man rescued from earthquake rubble 261 hours later in Antakya, Turkey, meets his 12-day-old baby at the hospital where he is being treated, February 17, 2023. Sezgin Pancar/Anadolu Agency/Getty

Rescue and recovery efforts have been more difficult across the border in Syria. The quake-hit part of the country is largely in rebel-held territory in Syria’s grueling 12-year civil war, and it took days for the government of dictator Bashar al-Assad to agree to open two more border crossings from Turkey to allow this. Human material flows.

CBS News reached out to the Syrian earthquake zone this week and found that, in the midst of extreme desperation, there are still people alive. However, some survivors emerge to find little left of their previous lives.

From under the crumbling concrete and twisted metal of a building that was recently home to more than 1,000 people, Mostafa El Mahrawi emerged alive earlier this week. Up to 800 of his neighbors died.

He told CBS News that he was trapped under the rubble with his wife and three children for more than 22 hours.

“I found a big rock and hit it as hard as I could and yelled ‘I’m here!'” he recalls. I’m here! “We saw a light, and my kids started shouting ‘Daddy, daddy, light!’”

The camera also captured the moment Al Mahrawi, his wife and children were rescued. It was a rare glimmer of hope in rebel-held Syria.

Urgent need for aid as death toll from Turkish-Syrian earthquakes rises 05:15

The region has already bore deep scars from the civil war when earthquakes brought more death and destruction. So many people have been killed by the earthquakes that farmland has been dug up for mass burials, but even this will not be enough for all the victims.

Now it is a race against time to help the living. CBS News found families displaced by the earthquakes sheltering in tents in an olive grove – another generation of Syrian children whose lives have been turned upside down.

The response to the disaster in Syria remains catastrophically slow, and many in the rebel-held north blame Assad. The president was recently seen greeting earthquake survivors in a Muwali district in the south.

He still controls most of the country’s borders, and aid flows through. Western countries, including the United States, have been wary of working with a regime imposed hard by the war, which has seen Assad’s forces and his allies kill hundreds of thousands of civilians.

It took massive pressure from the United Nations to convince the dictator to open two more land routes from Turkey for aid deliveries – eight long days after the earthquakes hit. It’s a temporary concession, and it’s set to close again in March, leaving just one border crossing from Turkey.

For Mustafa Al-Mahrawi, who had already endured years of war before earthquakes killed 20 members of his extended family, it’s just too much.

“I have no hope left,” he told CBS News. “Sometimes I think it would have been better if I stayed in the rubble.”

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Imtiaz Tayeb is a correspondent for CBS News in London.

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