A small smile on her bewildered face, her tiny pink socks and sweater seemingly unmarked, a nine-year-old girl is carried uninjured from the rubble of her home this morning after 60 hours trapped there.
Rescued from the “Armageddon” of rubble strewn Antakya in Turkey, the pig-tailed child is passed from rescue worker to rescue worker, her chubby arm wrapping around each of their necks in turn.
They clap at the miracle in their arms as she is zigzagged down the mound of collapsed buildings, smiling in astonishment, their relief at a rare rescue success amid mounting bodies palpable as they stare in disbelief and ruffle her hair.
Her 13-year-old brother and father followed unharmed too, but her mother was yet to be found.
British aid worker Atiqur Rahman from Stoke-On-Trent works for Global Relief Trust and filmed the scene unfolding early this morning.
“It’s Armageddon here, “ he described. “Now it’s 64/65 hours since the earthquake, the chances of people coming out alive is very low.
"But you have these amazing cases where because the foundations have gone on top of one another, the buildings have collapsed layer by layer, people manage to get into gaps.
“There was some noise coming from this family under the rubble, and some relatives stood outside as they knew the family was there.
“When they were carried out they were conscious and moving, obviously traumatised, but physically they were unharmed. One of our guys carried them out and the girl was responding to him.
“We get overwhelmed as soon as there is one case of good news. One guy has done a 28-hour shift and he said ‘We have pulled out seven alive but 100 bodies’, so with those kinds of odds everyone celebrates every person alive.
“Each case takes two to four, five hours, to get through to people.”
Atiqur found himself in Syria working for Global Relief Trust when the earthquake struck on Monday.
After assessing the scene there and hearing the situation in Antakya was worse, he travelled to the Turkish town.
Very few rescue attempts he has seen have been joyful. The girl and her brother and father are a rare moment of hope as nearly 16,000 bodies have now been counted in the destruction of Monday’s earthquake after a sharp jump in the grim toll overnight.
One of the first cases he assisted after the first quake was a mother in her late thirties whose hand was trapped under a large column inside a collapsed building.
Atiqur finds it hard to describe what happened, he still hasn’t processed it.
“Her husband called us over. Initially we thought it was wood and thought we could cut it, but we realised there was a lot more weight than we anticipated. We were trying to use anything we could, we were trying to use car jacks just to pull her out.
“The husband was saying ‘Cut the hand’, you could feel tremors. I was saying ‘There are no ambulances, if you cut the hand there is serious chance of bleeding to death’.
As we were discussing what to do a large tremor happened and we had to crawl out of that building immediately, for our own safety, the husband had children outside.
“The woman was conscious. She was left behind. We don’t know what happened. Once the tremor happened there was no way of getting back in, another building next to it was tilted half way and stuff was falling down into this building, sofas, chairs, a fridge were falling onto us.
“We had to make that decision. We had a split second decision to pull out and she was screaming saying ‘Don’t go, don’t go’.
“He had to leave, the children were out on the streets. We were saying we would come back but obviously she was terrified. It plays in your head, what if we had tried the car jack faster…
“Then we were called to something else, it’s one after another, the aim is to try and save as many lives as you can.”
The man waited nine hours for rescuers to come and pull his seven-year-old son from the rubble of their home. By the time they got there, it was too late.
He and the boy’s uncle could only cradle the small body and carry the boy to a temporary morgue. And pray.
British aid worker Salah Aboulgasem, 36, was by the father’s side in Gaziantep, Turkey, before rescue workers arrived, fearful to touch the rubble despite their desperation.
Salah from Birmingham, who has been working tirelessly to support families since the earthquake struck, described the agony and helplessness of waiting. “You move one piece, like Jenga, all of it moves, so you have to be careful,” he explained.
“The child was very small. The family was eagerly waiting, the father for eight or nine hours for his son. The rescue team then worked with him carefully for over an hour, trying to cause less damage, moving rubble in one direction, then another.
“His son was dead by the time they pulled him out. There is not much you can say at that stage, you can’t really look them in the eyes. People are grieving, it is very emotional.”
Salah describes those first hours after the earthquake as “mayhem”, and can barely process what he has seen.
He describes walking from mound to mound. “We are hearing voices under the rubble,” he said.
“It is still very raw and it is still happening.”
A colleague 100km away in Syria explained to him there were too many bodies there to bury separately.
“One colleague told me they actually - it’s shocking to say it - they are burying families in mass graves because there isn’t enough space, there are that many bodies. Multiple families are going into mass graves,” he said.
“There are bodies just left on the roads, they have recovered them but there isn’t enough body bags.”
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