A glimmer of hope against all odds – a 17-year-old girl on Thursday was pulled alive from the rubble of a collapsed building in the Turkish city of Kahramanmaras, more than 10 days after an earthquake devastated the region.
Footage showed Aleyna Olmez being carried on a stretcher to an ambulance covered with a gold-colored thermal blanket. From her hospital bed, she said she was well and tried to pass the time by distracting herself: “I had nothing with me.”
Sorrow and anger continue to mount in the region as efforts to find more survivors have been increasingly coming up short. But as hopes of finding more survivors are all but gone, rescue efforts have switched to excavations.
In Turkey’s Antakya, the city hit hardest by the 7.8-magnitude quake, hundreds wait painfully to see if their relatives are retrieved – dead or alive.
“We don’t know. The rescuers say that they’re dead, but we’re not sure,” said Antakya resident Hatice Karabiber.
“If rescue teams had come earlier, another family member would have been saved, but thank God anyway. It’s his justice and destiny,” said Beder Berekat, a Syrian refugee who fled to Turkey.
Meanwhile, the death toll from last week’s catastrophic quake continues to rise, surpassing 42,000 in both countries – the vast majority of them in Turkey.
Visiting the Turkish capital Ankara, where he met with Turkey’s foreign minister, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg saluted the country’s courage in the wake of the disaster: “This is the deadliest natural disaster on alliance territory since the foundation of NATO,” he said.
“On behalf of NATO, I offer my deepest condolences to the Turkish people and the families, and the loved ones of all those who lost their lives or were injured.”
As for Syria, where the areas hit the worst by the quake are under rebel control, the complete picture is a lot less clear.
“So far, what we know is that the death toll has exceeded 6,000 in Syria. We’re hoping that this number will not increase by much, but from what we’re seeing, what we’re hearing, the devastation of that earthquake is really not giving us a lot of hope that this will be the end of it,” said Muhannad Hadi, the UN regional humanitarian coordinator for the Syrian crisis.
Meanwhile, as more aid continues to pour into Turkey, onlookers at Istanbul’s airport applauded in gratitude as rescue teams from Greece and Japan headed back home after ending their search and rescue missions.
Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said close to 8,000 rescue and aid workers from 74 countries were still assisting Turkish teams in their efforts – efforts that are not expected to end anytime soon.
–i24 News
