Turkey-Syria Quake: Race against time to save survivors

GBNEWS24DESK//

Rescuers in Turkey and Syria battled frigid cold yesterday in a race against time to find survivors under buildings flattened by an earthquake that killed more than 7,200 people.

Tremors that inflicted more suffering on a border area, already plagued by conflict, leaving people on the streets burning debris to try to stay warm as international aid began to arrive.

But some extraordinary survival tales have emerged, including a newborn baby pulled alive from rubble in Syria, still tied by her umbilical cord to her mother who died in Monday’s quake.

“We heard a voice while we were digging,” Khalil al-Suwadi, a relative, told AFP. “We cleared the dust and found the baby with the umbilical cord (intact) so we cut it and my cousin took her to hospital.”

The infant is the sole survivor of her immediate family, the rest of whom were killed in the rebel-held town of Jindayris.

The 7.8-magnitude quake struck Monday as people slept, flattening thousands of structures, trapping an unknown number of people and potentially impacting millions.

Whole rows of buildings collapsed, leaving some of the heaviest devastations near the quake’s epicentre between the Turkish cities of Gaziantep and Kahramanmaras.

The destruction led to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declaring a three-month state of emergency in 10 southeastern provinces. The government planned to open up hotels in the tourism hub of Antalya, to the west, to temporarily house people impacted by the quakes, said Erdogan, who faces a national election in three months’ time.

Dozens of nations like the United States, China and the Gulf States have pledged to help, and search teams as well as relief supplies have begun to arrive by air.

Yet people in some of the hardest-hit areas said they felt like they had been left to fend for themselves.

“I can’t get my brother back from the ruins. I can’t get my nephew back. Look around here. There is no state official here, for God’s sake,” said Ali Sagiroglu in the Turkish city of Kahramanmaras.