Two women have been pulled alive from rubble after living under a collapsed building in Turkey for 122 hours.
The death toll in southern Turkey and northwestern Syria has now topped 24,150, and the disaster has been described by a UN official as “an earthquake that happens almost once in a lifetime.”
A 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit near Gaziantep in Turkey early Monday morning, followed by another 7.5 magnitude earthquake shortly after noon. The region continues to suffer from aftershocks.
One of the rescued women, Menexe Tabak, 70, was wrapped in a blanket as rescuers carried her to a waiting ambulance in Kahramanmaras province, images released by state agency Anadolu show.
The other was an injured 55-year-old man named Masallah Cicek, who was pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building in Diyarbakir, the largest city in southeastern Turkey, the agency said.
Online footage also shows a pregnant woman and her young daughter being rescued from a collapsed building in the Turkish city of Gaziantep after being trapped for 115 hours.
Teams from dozens of countries are among the thousands of rescuers working day and night on the ruins of thousands of collapsed buildings to find and rescue stranded survivors.
In cold weather, they call for calm, straining to hear the sounds of life emanating from the twisted concrete.
In Turkey’s Samandag district, rescuers crouched under concrete slabs and whispered “Inshallah” – “God willing” – as they carefully climbed into the rubble and pulled out a 10-day-old newborn baby.
With eyes wide open, baby Yagiz Ulas was wrapped in a thermal blanket and taken to a field hospital. Rescuers also took away his mother in a semi-conscious state and only conscious, on a stretcher, showed a video.
About 80,000 people are being treated in hospitals, and 1.05 million people have been left homeless due to earthquakes in makeshift shelters, Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay told reporters.
“Our main goal is to ensure that they can return to normal within a year by providing them with permanent housing and that they recover from pain as quickly as possible,” Oktay said.
With many people starving in harsh winter conditions, the leaders of both countries have doubts about their response.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan acknowledged that authorities should have reacted more quickly to Monday’s massive earthquake.
On Friday, he visited the Turkish province of Adiyaman, where he said: “Although we currently have the largest search and rescue team in the world, the reality is that the search is not progressing as fast as we would like.”
Opponents have used the issue to attack Erdogan, who is running for re-election on May 14, although it could be delayed due to the disaster.
Continued anger over delays in the delivery of humanitarian aid and rescue work is likely to play a role in the election.
Even before the earthquake, the vote was considered the most difficult test for Erdogan in his two decades in power. He called for solidarity and denounced what he called “negative campaigns for political interests”.
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of Turkey’s main opposition party, criticized the government’s response.
“The earthquake was powerful, but much stronger than the earthquake, there was a lack of coordination, planning and incompetence,” he said in a statement.
This was stated in an interview with BBC Radio 4 by the official representative of the UN Secretary-General António Guterres Stefan Dujarric. Today The earthquake program in Syria is extremely complex.
She said: “You are dealing with an almost unprecedented earthquake that has hit a country that has been in conflict for 12 years, where even before this humanitarian emergency there was a protracted humanitarian crisis that left more than four million people in need of assistance. received… required. .
“Much of the infrastructure was destroyed or damaged, including roads and bridges.
“In addition, you have a very difficult security situation, and you have areas to which we have to negotiate access between the government and between the rebels. And all this in the middle of winter.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made his first trip to the affected areas since the earthquake, visiting a hospital in Aleppo with his wife Asma, state media reported.
His government has authorized the delivery of humanitarian aid across the front lines of the country’s 12-year civil war, a move that could speed up relief efforts for millions of desperate people.
Earlier, the World Food Program said supplies in rebel-held northwest Syria were running low as the state of war hampered relief efforts.
Monday’s 7.8 magnitude quake, with multiple powerful aftershocks in Turkey and Syria, is the seventh-worst natural disaster this century, surpassing the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan and approaching the 31,000 deaths from the 2003 earthquake in neighboring Iran .
An equally powerful earthquake in northwestern Turkey in 1999 killed more than 17,000 people.
Source: I News
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