Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD: The rescue operations were underway on Wednesday, with teams busy pulling more bodies from the rubble of thousands of buildings torn down in Turkiye and Syria by a devastating earthquake that killed over 7,700 people.
Two days after the magnitude 7.8 strong earthquake struck southeastern Turkiye and northern Syria, rescue teams pulled a 3-year-old boy, Arif Kaan, from the rubble of a tore down apartment building in Kahramanmaras, a city close to the epicenter.
With the minor boy’s lower body trapped under twisted rebar and concrete slabs, rescuers lay a blanket over his torso to protect him from the freezing temperatures while they carefully cut the debris away from him, conscious of the risk of triggering another collapse.
Ertugrul Kisi, the boy’s father, who himself had been rescued earlier, sobbed as his son was loaded into an ambulance.
A few hours later, rescuers pulled ten-year-old Betul Edis from the rubble of her home in Adiyaman. The girl’s grandfather kissed her and spoke gently to her as she was loaded on an ambulance.
Rescue teams from over two dozen countries joined more than twenty-four thousand Turkish emergency workers and aid packages poured in.
Rescue operations in Syria
But with destruction spread to multiple towns and cities in Syria, voices crying from within under the rubble fell silent, and disappointment grew from those still waiting for help. Countries did not pledge aid in rescue operations like they offered to Turkiye.
In Syria, the quake toppled thousands of buildings and added more misery to the region, wrEcked by the the 12-year civil war and refugee crisis.
In a northwestern Syrian town Jinderis, locals found a crying newborn baby still connected by the umbilical cord to her dead mother. She was the only member of her unfortunate family to survive the shaking. According to World Health Organization (WHO), about twenty-three million people could be affected by the quake in both countries.
