ANTAKYA, Turkey (AP) — Rescue teams in Turkey on Saturday pulled to safety a family of five who survived inside their collapsed home for five days following a major earthquake in a sprawling border region of Turkey and Syria.
They first extricated mother and daughter Havva and Fatmagul Aslan from among a mound of debris in the hard-hit town of Nurdagi, in Gaziantep province, HaberTurk reported. The teams later reached the father, Hasan Aslan, but he insisted that his other daughter, Zeynep, and son Saltik Bugra be saved first.
Then, as the father was brought out, rescuers cheered and chanted “God is Great!”
Two hours later, a 3-year-old girl and her father were pulled from debris in the town of Islahiye, also in Gaziantep province, and an hour after that a 7-year-old girl was rescued in the province of Hatay, nearly 132 hours after the quake. The rescues bring to 12 the number of people rescued Saturday, despite diminishing hopes amid freezing temperatures.
“What day is it?” 16-year-old Kamil Can Agas asked his rescuers after he was pulled out of the rubble in Kahramanmaras, according to NTV television.
Members of the mixed Turkish and Kyrgyz search teams embraced each other, as did the teenager’s cousins, with one of them calling out: “He is out, brother. He is out. He is here.”
The rescues brought shimmers of joy amid overwhelming devastation days after Monday’s 7.8-magnitude quake collapsed thousands of buildings, killing more than 25,000 people, injuring another 80,000 and leaving millions homeless. Another quake nearly equal in power and likely triggered by the first caused more destruction hours later.
Even though experts say trapped people can live for a week or more, the odds of finding more survivors were quickly waning. Rescuers were shifting to thermal cameras to help identify life amid the rubble, a sign of the weakness of any remaining survivors.
Temperatures remained below freezing across the large region, and many people have no shelter. The Turkish government has distributed millions of hot meals, as well as tents and blankets, but is still struggling to reach many people in need.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visiting quake-stricken Diyarbakir, said universities would switch to long-distance education until the summer, to free up state-run dormitories for survivors left homeless.
In the city of Kahramanmaras, where a stadium was turned into a makeshift camp, survivors walked among hundreds of tents, queued for hot meals and huddled around campfires.
In Antakya, an international charity helping Syrian refugees in Turkey has offered shelter to dozens in the grounds of an intact building on the city’s edge.
The disaster compounded suffering in a region beset by Syria’s 12-year war, which has displaced millions of people within the country and left them dependent on aid. The fighting sent millions more to seek refuge in Turkey.
The conflict has isolated many areas of Syria and complicated efforts to get aid in. The United Nations said the first earthquake-related aid convoy crossed from Turkey into northwestern Syria on Friday, the day after an aid shipment planned before the disaster arrived.
The UN refugee agency estimated that as many as 5.3 million people have been left homeless in Syria.
President Bashar Assad and his wife have visited injured quake victims in a hospital in the coastal city of Latakia.
Syrian state TV said Assad and his wife Asma on Saturday morning visited Duha Nurallah, 60, and her son Ibrahim Zakariya, 22, who were pulled out of rubble the night before in the nearby coastal town of Jableh.
The head of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus arrived in Syria’s northern city of Aleppo on Saturday, bringing with him 35 tons of medical equipment, state news agency SANA reported. He said another plane carrying an additional 30 tons of medical equipment will arrive in the coming days.
The total death toll in Syria’s northwestern militant-held region has reached 2,166 many of them women and children. The total dead in Syria was 3,533, while in Turkey, President said that the number of those killed in the quakes had reached 21,848.