Antakya (Turkey): Crouching under concrete slabs and whispering “Inshallah” (God willing), rescuers cautiously waded into the rubble, then passed their prize down the line – a 10-day-old newborn who had been living with his mother in the collapsed building. Lived together for four days. His eyes wide open, Turkish baby Yagiz Ulas was wrapped in a shiny thermal blanket and taken to a field medical center in Samdag, Hatay province, on Friday. Video images from Turkey’s disaster agency showed emergency workers carried away his mother, also stunned and pale but conscious, on a stretcher.
The rescue of several young children has lifted the spirits of weary crews searching for survivors for a fifth day after a massive earthquake in Turkey and neighboring Syria that killed more than 21,000 people.
Rescuers, including specialist teams from dozens of countries, toiled through the ruins of thousands of dilapidated buildings through the night. In freezing temperatures, they regularly called for silence as they listened for any sounds of life from the crumbling concrete mound.
In the Turkish city of Kahramanmaras, 200 km (125 miles) north of Samdag, orange-clad workers squeezed into an air pocket under a collapsed building to find a child crying, dust falling into his eyes , before relief settled over him and slowly wiped his face as the rescuer Turkish Defense Ministry video shows.
In Turkey’s east, another boy’s terrified face appeared from a panicked building, his cries rising above the sound of drills and grinders trying to free him on Friday morning in the Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakır, where the 7.8 Magnitude earthquakes and aftershocks turned apartment blocks into mounds of rubble and piles of shattered masonry,
After opening a wide hole, the staff put an oxygen mask on his face and took him to a safe place. Like baby Yagiz, his mother was behind him on a stretcher 103 hours after the earthquake. And across the border in Syria, rescuers from the White Helmets group used bare hands to dig through plaster and cement, thick dust-laden air, until reaching the bare feet of a young girl, clad in pink pyjamas, Joe is now muddy from the days trapped, but alive and free at last.