Children plucked from ruins days after earthquake as death tolls tops 22,000

ANTAKYA, Turkey/JANDARIS, SYRIA: Rescue crews saved a 10-day-old baby and his mother trapped in ruins of a building in Turkey on Friday and dug several people from other sites as President Tayyip Erdogan said authorities should have reacted faster to this week’s huge earthquake.

The confirmed death toll from the deadliest quake in the region in two decades stood at more than 22,000 across southern Turkey and northwest Syria four days after it hit.

Hundreds of thousands more people have been left homeless and short of food in bleak winter conditions and leaders in both countries have faced questions about their response.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made his first reported trip to affected areas since the quake, visiting a hospital in Aleppo with his wife Asma, state media reported.

His government also approved humanitarian aid deliveries across the frontlines of the country’s 12-year civil war, a move that could speed up the arrival of help for millions of desperate people. The World Food Program said earlier it was running out of stocks in rebel-held northwest Syria as the state of war there complicated relief efforts.

Erdogan on Friday visited Turkey’s Adiyaman province, where he acknowledged the government’s response was not as fast as it could have been.

“Although we have the largest search and rescue team in the world right now, it is a reality that search efforts are not as fast as we wanted them to be,” he said.

HOPE AMID THE RUINS

Rescuers, including teams from dozens of countries, toiled night and day in the ruins of thousands of wrecked buildings to find buried survivors. In freezing temperatures, they regularly called for silence as they listened for any sound of life from mangled concrete mounds.

In the Samandag district of Turkey’s Hatay province, rescuers crouched under concrete slabs and whispering “inshallah” (God willing), carefully reached into the rubble and picked out a 10-day-old newborn.

His eyes wide open, baby Yagiz Ulas was wrapped in a thermal blanket and carried to a field hospital. Emergency workers also took away his mother, dazed and pale but conscious on a stretcher, video images showed.

In Diyarbakir to the east, Sebahat Varli, 32, and her son Serhat were rescued and taken to hospital on Friday morning, 100 hours after the quake.

Across the border in Syria, rescuers from the White Helmets group used their hands to dig though plaster and cement until reaching the bare foot of a young girl, still wearing pink pajamas, grimy but alive and free.

But hopes were fading that many more would be found alive.