Turkey-Syria earthquake: Days after deadly shake odds of finding more survivors are fading
ITV News reporter Peter Smith is on the ground in Turkey, where rescuers are carrying out painstaking, and heartbreaking operations to find the last survivors five days after the quake
By Multimedia Producer Lottie Kilraine
Six members of the same family found huddled together and two frightened sisters who were comforted by a pop song as they waited to be freed from the rubble, are among the dramatic rescue stories still coming out of Turkey.
The rescues have offered fleeting moments of joy amid the catastrophe of Monday’s 7.8-magnitude earthquake that hit parts of Turkey and Syria, killing more than 28,000 people and leaving millions homeless.
Even though experts say trapped people can live for a week or more, the odds of finding more survivors are fading.
In Adiyaman, a hard-hit city of more than a quarter-million people, rescuers and onlookers suppressed their joy so as not to frighten four-year-old Yagiz Komsu as he emerged from the debris.
To distract him, rescuers offered Yagiz a jelly bean and teams later rescued his 27-year-old mother, Ayfer Komsu, who had a broken rib.
In the city of Iskenderun in Turkey, rescuers had identified nine people trapped inside the remains of a high-rise apartment block and pulled out six of them, HaberTurk television reported.
A video of another rescue effort in Kahramanmaras showed an emergency worker playing a pop song on his smartphone to distract the two teenage sisters as they waited to be freed from the rubble.
But the flurry of dramatic rescues could not obscure the devastation spread across a sprawling border region that is home to more than 13.5 million people.
Entire neighbourhoods of high-rises have been reduced to rubble, with many more bodies yet to be recovered and counted.
Another video shows an emotional scene as relatives wept when rescuers pulled 17-year-old Adnan Muhammed Korkut from a basement in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, near the quake’s epicentre.
He had been forced to drink his own urine to survive after being trapped for 94 hours under the wreckage of the quake.
“Thank God you arrived,” he can be hear saying as he embraces his mother as he was being loaded into an ambulance.
Despite these stories showing the best of humanity, the reality for the survivors of the disaster are far from bright.
Temperatures have remained below freezing across the large region, and many people have no shelter.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who toured the region this week, conceded shortcomings in the initial stages of the response but insisted that everything was now under control.
His political rivals have already begun criticising his government's response to the earthquake, saying that over the course of two decades he failed to prepare the country for the inevitable.
Experts point to lax enforcement of building codes as a major reason why this week's quakes were so deadly.
Meanwhile in Syria, the state news agency SANA said paramedics have succeeded in pulling a mother and her two adult children from under the rubble of a building in the coastal town of Jableh.
SANA says the three survivors are Duha Nurallah, 60, her son Ibrahim Zakariya, 22, and her daughter Rawiya 24.
The three were immediately rushed away in ambulances late on Friday.
The disaster has compounded suffering in a region already ravaged by a 12-year civil war, which has displaced millions of people within the country and left them dependent on aid.
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 north-western Syria on Friday - a day after an aid shipment planned before the disaster arrived.
The Syrian government has decided to allow earthquake aid to reach all parts of the country, including areas held by insurgent groups in the northwest.
Syrian state TV reported that the government announced during a meeting on Friday that all aid deliveries would be made under the supervision of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent to guarantee that they reach people in need.
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