Several survivors rescued over a week after earthquake in Turkey | CBC News

At least five survivors were rescued on Tuesday from the rubble of earthquake-hit areas of Turkey, local media reported, eight days after the worst quake in the country’s modern history.

A woman and a man were pulled out from the ruins in the southern city of Hatay some 204 hours after the quake hit the region and parts of northwest Syria, Turkish media said.

Earlier on Tuesday, an 18-year-old named Muhammed Cafer was rescued from the rubble of a building in southern Turkey some 198 hours after last Monday’s earthquake, broadcaster CNN Turk said.

In Turkey’s Adiyman province, broadcasters showed rescue workers carrying Cafer strapped on a stretcher, an oxygen mask on his face and a health worker holding an IV bag, from the site of the collapsed building to a waiting ambulance.

Cafer could be seen moving his fingers as he was carried away.

WATCH | Teenagers pulled from rubble in separate rescues Tuesday:

2 teens rescued from under collapsed buildings in Turkey

An 18-year-old from Adiyaman, Turkey, and a 17-year-old from Kahramanmaras have been pulled to safety by rescue teams after being trapped for more than a week under buildings that collapsed after last week’s earthquakes.

A short while earlier, rescue workers pulled two brothers alive from the ruins of an apartment block in neighbouring Kahramanmaras province.

State-owned Anadolu news agency identified them as 17-year-old Muhammed Enes Yeninar and his brother, 21-year-old Baki Yeninar, who was rescued after him.

They were both placed in ambulances and taken to hospital. Their condition was unclear.

‘We will start from zero’

Other survivors joined a mass exodus from earthquake-hit zones in Turkey on Tuesday, some leaving their homes with little hope of coming back or seeing loved ones pulled away from the rubble, at a time when some of the rescue teams are leaving.

“It is very hard.… We will start from zero, without belongings, without a job,” said 22-year-old Hamza Bekry, a Syrian originally from Idlib who has lived in Hatay, in southern Turkey, for 12 years.

“Our house collapsed completely. Several of our relatives died. There are still ones under the rubble,” he went on, as he prepared to follow his family to Isparta in southern Turkey.

WATCH | Survivor made banging noises after voice went hoarse:

Turkish woman survives 5 days trapped under earthquake rubble

A woman in Turkey whose rescue was captured by a CBC News camera is now recovering in hospital after being trapped under earthquake rubble for nearly five days. Her family is grateful, and her doctors say she was rescued just in time.

He will become one of more than 158,000 people who have evacuated the vast swath of southern Turkey hit by the quake, one of the deadliest temblors in the region’s modern history.

The disaster, with a combined death toll in Turkey and neighbouring Syria now exceeding 37,000, has devastated whole cities in both countries, leaving survivors homeless in the bitter cold, at times sleeping on piles of rubble.

“I do not have a lot of expectation from this life but the lives of our children are important,” Riza Atahan, from Hatay, said as he put his wife and daughter on a bus heading to safety some 300 kilometres away.

Dozens of residents and first responders voiced bewilderment at a lack of water, food, medicine, body bags and cranes in the disaster zone in the first days after the quake.

“People are not dead because of the earthquake, they are dead because of precautions that weren’t taken earlier,” said Said Qudsi who lost his uncle, aunt and their two sons in the quake.

Turkey’s Urbanization Minister Murat Kurum has said some 42,000 buildings had either collapsed, were in urgent need of demolition or severely damaged across 10 cities.

Syria rescues becoming less likely

In Syria’s shattered Aleppo city, United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths said on Monday that the rescue phase was “coming to a close,” with the focus turning to shelter, food and schooling as low temperatures reduced the already slim chances of survival.

In a public playground in Turkey’s southeastern city of Gaziantep, Syrian refugees made homeless by the quake used plastic sheets, blankets, cardboard and broken up pieces of furniture to erect makeshift tents on a patch of grass.

“People are suffering a lot. We applied to receive tent, aid or something but until now we didn’t receive anything,” said Hassan Saimoua, a refugee staying with his family in the playground.

The search for survivors is about to end in the opposition-held northwest of Syria eight days after the quake, the head of the White Helmets main rescue group, Raed al Saleh, said.

“The indications we have are that there are not any [survivors] but we are trying to do our final checks on all sites,” he said.

Russia also said it was wrapping up its search and rescue work in Turkey and Syria and preparing to withdraw from the disaster zone.

The Turkish toll was 31,974 killed, the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority said on Tuesday. More than 5,814 have died in Syria, according to a Reuters tally of reports from Syrian state media and a UN agency.

LISTEN | For Syrian refugees, earthquakes add to an already precarious situation:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who faces an election scheduled for June that is expected to be the toughest of his two decades in power, acknowledged problems in the initial response but said the situation was now under control.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad agreed to allow UN aid to enter from Turkey via two more border crossings late on Monday, the world body said, in a move that could help get aid to those in northwest Syria.

It has so far received little help compared to government-held areas, leading to widespread anger among people living in the region who feel they have been left to fend for themselves.