Back-to-back rescues of five people from the wreckage 11 days after the catastrophic earthquakes that ravaged Türkiye’s southeast have been hailed nationwide as a miracle.
Mustafa Avcı, 34, was discovered alive in the wreckage of a hospital in the Hatay district of Antakya some 261 hours into the aftermath on Thursday.
Right after Avcı, rescuers realized another survivor was in the rubble and managed to reach Mehmet Ali Şakiroğlu, 26, in their race against time.
Both survivors, weak and injured after days in the rubble, were immediately taken to a field hospital while bystanders clapped and celebrated the happy event.
One of the rescuers phoned Avcı’s family for him when he wanted to find out about their fate. “Has everyone made it out alive? Let me talk to them, Nazlı,” Avcı said to his sister on the phone.
After he was assured that “everyone is OK,” Avcı was relieved, kissing the hand of his rescuer and thanking him.
Şakiroğlu, meanwhile, was revealed to have survived thanks to a “triangle of life” that appeared in the rubble. He was in the hospital for his son, whom he, his wife and father had brought for treatment the night of the earthquake.
Şakiroğlu’s family, including his son, had been pulled alive from the rubble on the first day of the disaster, his father Mustafa Boyraz told reporters.
“I knew my son was alive, I never lost hope,” he said. “May God give Türkiye some joy.”
As he was carried out of the debris on a stretcher, Şakiroğlu told his rescuers, “They gave me food, I went back to sleep. When I woke up, I was hungry again and you came,” according to Barış Pirebaş, the head of Katak Search and Rescue Squad who works in the area.
“We’re not sure if he imagined eating or made it up in his daze of shock,” Pirebaş told reporters following the rescue.
Pirebaş also revealed the crews suspected another survivor was in the wreckage and were working to find them.
An hour earlier, in another Antakya neighborhood, rescuers found a 14-year-old boy named Osman in the wreckage when a sniffing dog detected his scent and led the crews to the spot.
Osman sported no visible injuries when the rescuers reached him, one of the workers said. “He didn’t ask for anything from us.”
Osman’s rescue followed two others the same day.
On the 258th hour following the earthquakes, workers pulled 29-year-old Neslihan Kılınç out of a flattened building in Kahramanmaraş, the epicenter of the 7.7 magnitude tremor, wrapped her in a blanket and carried her to an ambulance to be transported a hospital, a live broadcast by private network NTV showed.
More than 250 people had lost their lives in the complex of high-rises where Kılınç was found alive, said another private broadcaster CNN Türk.
According to reporters on the ground and Kılınç’s brother, her husband and children, aged 5 and 2, were still trapped in the wreckage by the time she was saved. Her sergeant husband had “just arrived” from Syria, Kılınç’s father Cuma Yalçınöz revealed.
At the Kahramanmaraş Sütçü Imam Hospital, a doctor informed Kılınç was in “stable condition” and able to speak.
Kılınç's rescue came some 10 hours after 17-year-old Aleyna Ölmez was pulled from rubble earlier in the day.
"She seemed to be in good health. She opened and closed her eyes," coal miner Ali Akdoğan, who took part in the rescue effort of Ölmez, told the Agence France-Presse (AFP) in Kahramanmaraş.
"We have been working here in this building for a week now ... We came here with the hope of hearing sounds. We are happy whenever we find a living thing – even if it is a cat," he said.
The girl's uncle tearfully hugged the rescuers one by one, saying, "We will never forget you."
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan too immediately phoned Aleyna’s parents to extend his good wishes and assure them, “We’re prepared to do everything we can.”
While rescuers kept digging into concrete and dirt to unearth whoever they could across the 10 cities hit by the tremors, a group of firefighters also found a cat stranded on the third floor of a damaged building in Hatay following reports by a social media user that the animal had been waiting to be saved for the past 11 days.
Turkish authorities revised the death toll of the deadliest disaster in Türkiye’s modern history to 38,044 on Thursday.
The Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) said nearly 265,000 personnel, including international rescuers and volunteers, were still on the ground to search for survivors.
