Rescue teams in Türkiye on Saturday pulled to safety a family of five who survived inside their collapsed home for five days following a pair of major earthquakes in a sprawling border region of Türkiye and Syria. The death toll from both countries, however, has surpassed 25,000.
They first extricated mother and daughter Havva and Fatmagül Aslan from among a mound of debris in the hard-hit town of Nurdağı, in Gaziantep province, HaberTürk reported. The teams later reached the father, Hasan Aslan, but he insisted that his other daughter, Zeynep, and son Saltık Buğra be saved first.
Then, as the father was brought out, rescuers cheered and chanted "Allah is Great!"
Two hours later, a 3-year-old girl and her father were pulled from debris in the town of Islahiye, also in Gaziantep province, and an hour after that a 7-year-old girl was rescued in the province of Hatay, nearly 132 hours after the quake. The rescues bring to 12 the number of people rescued Saturday, despite diminishing hopes amid freezing temperatures.
"What day is it?" 16-year-old Kamilcan Ağdaş asked his rescuers after he was pulled out of the rubble in Kahramanmaraş, according to NTV television.
Members of the mixed Turkish and Kyrgyz search teams embraced each other, as did the teenager's cousins, with one of them calling out: "He is out, brother. He is out. He is here."
The rescues brought shimmers of joy amid overwhelming devastation days after Monday's 7.7-magnitude quake collapsed thousands of buildings, killing 21,848 people, injuring another 80,104 and leaving millions homeless in Türkiye. Another quake nearly equal in power caused more destruction hours later.
Not everything ended so well, however. Rescuers reached a 13-year-old girl inside the debris of a collapsed building in Hatay province early on Saturday and intubated her. But she died before the medical teams could amputate a limb and free her from the rubble, media reported.
Even though experts say trapped people can live for a week or more, the odds of finding more survivors were quickly waning. Rescuers were shifting to thermal cameras to help identify life amid the rubble, a sign of the weakness of any remaining survivors.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visiting quake-stricken Diyarbakır, said universities would switch to long-distance education until the summer, to free up state-run dormitories for survivors left homeless.
In the city of Kahramanmaraş, where a stadium was turned into a makeshift camp, survivors walked among hundreds of tents, queued for hot meals and huddled around campfires.
In Antakya, an international charity helping Syrian refugees in Türkiye has offered shelter to dozens in the grounds of an intact building on the city's edge.