He is a picture of hope amid the devastation and despair. A two-year-old boy is plucked from the rubble alive, 133 hours after being buried in Monday’s earthquake.
Aliye Dagli is one of several children who have survived for five days against all odds. The official death toll is now 21,848 in Turkey and 3,553 in Syria but the United Nations warned the number could double.
Also in Turkey’s Hatay province, 35-year-old Ozlem Yilmaz and her six-year-old daughter Hatice were found alive in the ruins after 117 hours. And after 119 hours buried in Kahramanmaras, Kamil Can Agas, 16, asked his rescuers: “What day is it?”
In the same ruined city, a man was pictured smiling yesterday as he was reunited with his cat.
Near the epicentre in Nurdagi, a mother and father, their two daughters and son were all pulled out of the remains of their home after 129 hours trapped.
Havva Aslan and daughters Fatmagul and Zeynep were the first members of the family to emerge. They were closely followed by her son Saltik and husband Hasan, who had insisted his wife and children were taken out first.
Overjoyed emergency teams cheered and chanted: “God is great!”
Thousands more rescuers, some using thermal-imaging cameras, carried on the search last night. But experts warned the odds of finding more survivors in the freezing cold were getting lower and lower. One 13-year-old died in a collapsed building in Hatay before medics could amputate a limb to free her.
Relief co-ordinator Martin Griffiths said: “It’s really difficult to estimate very precisely, but I’m sure it’ll double or more. What happened in the epicentre of the earthquake is the worst event in 100 years in this region.”
Monday’s 7.8 magnitude quake – one of the biggest in a century – was followed by a 7.5 tremor hours later. It struck near the Turkey-Syria border in the early hours. More than 8,000 search-and-rescue experts from nearly 100 countries are now helping on the ground.
The Disasters Emergency Committee, which links 15 UK charities, said its appeal has raised over £50million in two days.
Chief executive Saleh Saeed said: “We’re incredibly grateful to the British public for their hugely generous response. It’s impossible not to see images on TV and hear the stories coming from Turkey and Syria and not be moved.”
More than 80,000 people have been injured and millions are homeless. The quake destroyed everything from the newest apartment blocks to centuries-old buildings – such as the Habibi Neccar mosque in Antakya.
Speaking from the flattened city of Gaziantep, David Wightwick, chief executive of medical charity UK Med, said: “We are anticipating a significant health crisis over the coming months.
“In some places, most of the medical facilities have been destroyed and in other places they’ve been damaged to the extent where they cannot be used. Lost houses means lost everything, including medication, your healthcare and whatever support you had.”
