Turkish woman rescued from rubble a week after earthquake

CNN Turk reported on Monday, February 13 that a lady was retrieved alive from the wreckage of a fallen building in Turkey, a week after a huge earthquake slammed Turkey and Syria, killing more than 33,000 people.

Sibel Kaya, age 40, was rescued in the southern province of Gaziantep almost 170 hours after the first of two earthquakes slammed the region, according to the report. In the wreckage of a building in Kahramanmaras, rescue teams had also made touch with three survivors, thought to be a mother, daughter, and infant.

With the likelihood of discovering further survivors diminishing, the death toll in both nations surpassed 33,000 on Sunday and appeared to continue rising. It was Turkey’s worst earthquake since 1939.

Sunday, almost 160 hours after the earthquake occurred, rescue crews from Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus rescued a guy from a fallen building in Turkey, according to the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations.

“It took more than four hours to extricate the victim from the wreckage,” the ministry stated on Telegram accompanying a video showing rescuers removing a man from the debris and bringing him away.

The nighttime activity posed a risk to human life due to the probable collapse of buildings.

Sunday, business owners in a core neighborhood of one of the hardest-hit cities in southern Turkey, Antakya, evacuated their stores to prevent thieves from stealing products.

Residents and humanitarian workers from neighboring cities reported deteriorating security circumstances, with widespread reports of robberies of shops and collapsed homes.

President Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has stated that the government will take decisive action against thieves, as he confronts concerns over his response to the earthquake ahead of a June election that is considered to be the most difficult of his two decades in office.

The earthquake is currently the sixth most fatal natural catastrophe of the 21st century, behind the Pakistan earthquake of 2005, which killed at least 73,000 people.

On Sunday, a father and daughter, a child, and a 10-year-old girl were among the survivors rescued from the rubble of fallen buildings in Turkey, but such sights are becoming increasingly unusual as the death toll continues to rise.

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At a funeral near Reyhanli, veiled women wept and pounded their chests as coffined, blanket-wrapped, and open-coffined remains were unloaded from vans.

Some neighbors attempted to salvage anything they could from the devastation.

In Elbistan, the epicenter of an aftershock almost as violent as Monday’s first 7.8 magnitude earthquake, Mustafa Bahcivan, a 32-year-old mobile store owner, said he had been in town nearly every day since then. On Sunday, he combed through the debris in search of any of his phones that were still undamaged and marketable.

The conflicts that have ravaged Syria over the past 12 years of civil war are now impeding aid efforts.

A UN spokeswoman stated that permission concerns with the Islamist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which controls the majority of the region, had slowed the delivery of earthquake help from government-held territories to territory controlled by hardline opposition parties.

A source for the HTS in Idlib told Reuters that the organization would not let any supplies from government-held regions and that aid would come via Turkey’s northern border.

UN spokesman Jens Laerke stated that the organization hopes to expand cross-border activities by creating two new border crossings between Turkey and opposition-held Syria for relief supplies.

On Sunday, the foreign minister of US ally the United Arab Emirates met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the first high-level Arab visit since the earthquake.

Several Arab nations have given assistance to Assad in the aftermath of the earthquake. Western nations, which attempted to isolate Assad following his 2011 crackdown on protesters and the onset of civil war, are key contributors to U.N. humanitarian operations across Syria, but have supplied little direct help to Damascus during the civil war.

Sunday also marked the arrival in Damascus of the first consignment of European earthquake help for Syrian government-held areas.

Geir Pedersen, the UN ambassador for Syria, stated in Damascus that the United Nations was organizing funds to help Syria. “We are trying to convince everyone to put politics aside and come together in favor of the Syrian people,” he stated.

The earthquake ranks as the sixth deadliest natural catastrophe of the 21st century, surpassing the 31,000 deaths caused by an earthquake in neighboring Iran in 2003.

It has killed 29,605 people in Turkey and around 3,500 in Syria, where the death toll has not been updated in two days.

Turkey said that around 80,000 people were hospitalized and more than one million were in temporary shelters.

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