union, agencies (capitals)
Yesterday, rescue workers pulled a 10-day-old baby and his mother from the rubble of a collapsed building in Turkey, and also rescued a number of people from other locations, which added to the morale of exhausted search teams, while President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the authorities should have React faster to the huge earthquake this week.
The death toll exceeded 23,000 people in southern Turkey and northwestern Syria, as a result of an earthquake the likes of which the region had not witnessed over the past two decades. Hundreds of thousands of people are left homeless and suffer from lack of food in the harsh winter conditions.
Official media said that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, accompanied by his wife Asmaa, visited a hospital in Aleppo, and declared the earthquake-affected areas.
His government also agreed to deliver humanitarian aid across the front lines of the country’s 12-year-old civil war, in a step that would accelerate the arrival of aid to millions of people.
Yesterday, Erdogan visited the Turkish region of Adiyaman, “Mansur Fort”, and said there that the government’s response was not as fast as required. “Although we have the largest search and rescue team in the world at the moment, the truth is that the search efforts are not as fast as we would like,” the Turkish president said. Rescuers, including relief teams from dozens of countries, worked through the night to clear the rubble of thousands of collapsed buildings. Amidst the freezing weather, rescue teams repeatedly ask people to remain silent to listen for any sound of life from under the concrete blocks.
In the Samandağ district of Hatay province, yesterday, rescuers crawled under concrete blocks and whispered “God willing” as they cautiously tried to clear the rubble and pulled out a 10-day-old baby.
Rescuers covered baby Yagiz Ulas with a blanket and took him to a field hospital. Video footage showed emergency workers carrying his mother on a stretcher, dazed and pale, but conscious.
In the eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir, 32-year-old Sebahat Farli and her son, Serhat, were picked up by rescue workers and taken to hospital yesterday morning, 100 hours after the earthquake.
On Turkey’s border with Syria, rescuers used their hands to dig until they came to the feet of a little girl who was still alive. But hopes of finding more survivors in the rubble are fading.
In the Syrian town of Jenderes, Nasser al-Wakaa began to sob as he sat on the pile of rubble and twisted metal where his family’s home was located, cuddling clothes that had belonged to one of his children.
He shouted, “Bilal, O Bilal,” referring to one of his deceased sons.
The death toll from the 7.8-magnitude earthquake and strong aftershocks in both countries exceeded the death toll recorded in a similar earthquake that struck northwest Turkey in 1999, killing more than 17,000.
The earthquake is currently ranked seventh among the deadliest natural disasters this century, surpassing the Japan earthquake and tsunami in 2011 and close to the total number of victims of an earthquake in neighboring Iran in 2003 that killed 31,000 people. Erdogan said the death toll rose to nearly 20,000 yesterday. More than 3,300 people died in Syria as a result of the quake, but rescuers said many more were still under the rubble.
According to Turkish and United Nations officials, some 24.4 million people have been affected in Syria and Turkey in an area stretching 450 kilometers from Adana in the west to Diyarbakir in the east. In Syria, the earthquake claimed the lives of people as far as Hama, 250 km from the epicenter.
Many have set up shelters in supermarket car parks, mosques, roadsides or even amid rubble. Survivors are in dire need of food, water and means of heating, in addition to the scarcity of latrines in the most distressed areas. Official media said that the delivery of aid in Syria across the front lines, which was agreed upon yesterday, will be carried out in cooperation with the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.
Dozens of planes carrying aid have arrived in areas controlled by the Syrian government since Monday.
#Syria #Turkey. #glimmer #hope #rubble