Turkey-Syria earthquake: ‘hope and despair’ in rescue effort

An eight-year-old boy was rescued from a collapsed building in Hatay, the worst-hit province in Turkey, 52 hours after the first earthquake struck. As rescue workers struggled to cope with the scale of destruction, “desperate screams for help could be heard from those trapped”, said Reuters. “They’re making noises,” one local told the agency, “but nobody is coming.”

Smoke billows from Iskenderun Port in Turkey. Thousands of buildings have been reduced to rubble by the powerful earthquake.

Rescuers in the village of Jinderis in rebel-held Syria “pulled a newborn baby, naked and covered with dust and bruises, from the debris”, said The Washington Post. She is thought to have been born under the rubble because rescuers cut her umbilical cord. “But if the rescue was miraculous, the circumstances were tragic,” said the Post. “The unnamed baby’s mother was dead, as were her father and four siblings.”

“Few images depict the agony quite as plainly as a photograph from the Turkish region of Kahramanmaraş, in which a father holds the hand of his dead teenage daughter,” said The Guardian. The image shows Mesut Hancer holding onto 15-year-old Irmak “as she lies on her bed beneath the slabs of concrete”, said the paper.

A woman waits for news of her loved ones, believed to be trapped under a collapsed building. “Turkey is used to natural disasters,” said CNN, “but Monday’s quake, one of the strongest in the last century, has shaken the nation to its core.” And complicating rescue efforts is the possibility that further aftershocks could still come, potentially causing more buildings to collapse.

Buildings are flattened across Hatay, described by The Times as “a mountainous thumb of land jutting down into Syria at the western end of the border”, where rescue workers are “still struggling to reach the hardest-hit places”.

An injured girl is brought out of a collapsed building in Jandaris, Syria. “With one day left in what experts have called the ‘critical’ first 72 hours, these moments of hope are expected to occur less and less frequently,” said Sky News. “And once survivors have been rescued they face another crisis – the cold.”

A man carries a survivor from a collapsed building in Hatay. Despite the valiant rescues, one White Helmets (Syrian civil defence) volunteer told Time magazine that the aftermath of the earthquakes had been nothing short of “heartbreaking”.