ANTAKYA, TURKEY/JANDARIS, SYRIA, February 10 – Rescue workers pulled a 10-day-old boy and his mother from the ruins of a collapsed building in Turkey on Friday and exhumed several others at another location four days later. . The earthquake brought death and destruction to southern Turkey and northwestern Syria.
The confirmed death toll from the deadliest earthquake to hit the region in 20 years was 21,000 in both countries on Friday.
Hundreds of thousands more are left homeless and unfed in harsh winter conditions, desperate for multinational relief efforts to ease their suffering.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad reportedly visited a hospital in Aleppo on his first visit to the affected areas since the earthquake, according to state media. But the World Food Program said supplies were running low in rebel-held northwestern Syria. In the Samandag district of Turkey’s Hatay province on Friday, rescuers crouched under a concrete slab and, whispering “Inshallah” (God’s will), carefully reached into the rubble to hold a 10-day-old newborn.
Wide-eyed baby Goat Ulas was wrapped in a thermal blanket and taken to a field hospital. As video images show, rescue workers also took away her mother, who was lying on a stretcher, pale but conscious of her.
In the eastern city of Diyarbakir, 32-year-old Sebahat Varli and his son Serhat were rescued and taken to the hospital Friday morning, 100 hours after the quake.
Across the Syrian border, White in her helmet Her group’s rescuers dug their hands through the plaster and cement to reach the bare feet of a girl still in pink pyjamas. The death toll from the 7.8-magnitude quake and several powerful aftershocks in both countries surpassed the 17,000 killed in 1999 when a similar earthquake struck northwestern Turkey.
This is her seventh deadliest natural disaster of the century, coming close to the 31,000 dead in the 2003 earthquake in neighbouring Iran, prior to the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami.
Turkey’s death toll rose to 18,342 and injured to 74,242 as of Friday morning, according to the civil protection agency AFAD.
More than 3,300 people have died in Syria, but rescuers said many more were lying under the rubble.
According to Turkish officials and the United Nations, about 24.4 million people have been affected in Syria and Turkey in an area spanning about 450 km (280 miles) from Adana in the west to Diyarbakir in the east. In Syria, people were killed as far as Hama, 250 kilometres from the epicentre.
Many have found refuge in supermarket parking lots, mosques, roadsides and ruins. Survivors are often in dire need of food, water and warmth, and there are few functioning toilets in affected areas.
Aid measures in Syria have been made more difficult by her 11-year civil war there. Syrians have expressed despair at the slow response, including in Assad-controlled areas alienated from the West. On Friday, 14 trucks loaded with humanitarian aid arrived in northern Syria from Turkey, the International Organization for Migration said in Geneva. They carried electric stoves, tents, blankets, etc.
But the World Food Program (WFP) said supplies were in short supply in northwestern Syria, where 90% of the population depended on humanitarian aid. She called for the opening of more border crossings from Turkey.
The Syrian government, under Western sanctions, has requested UN aid, saying all aid must be coordinated with Damascus and come from within Syria, not across Turkish borders.
