ALIVE! Two-year-old Aliye among the miracle children pulled from rubble after f ive days
A TWO-YEAR-OLD girl was among the miracle child survivors pulled from the rubble of their homes yesterday – more than five days after the devastating earthquake that rocked Turkey and Syria.
Little Aliye Dagli smiled sweetly as she was cradled by elated, exhausted rescuers in the Turkish city of Antakya, one of the worst-hit areas of the ‘disaster of the century’ that has claimed 25,000 lives.
Aliye somehow survived 133 hours trapped in the debris of her home, but the fate of her parents is unknown.
Pictures also showed the moment rescue teams plucked four-year-old Sengül Karabacak and her father from the wreckage of a destroyed building in Gaziantep.
The pair were trapped when the 7.8-magnitude quake destroyed their five-storey block of flats in Islahiye, Gaziantep province, in the early hours of Monday. They survived for 132 hours.
Turkey’s Health Minister, Dr Fahrettin Koca, tweeted about Sengül’s rescue, saying
‘It it had been 40C, you would survive only a day or two’
that she had ‘given life a kiss’. Video footage showed the youngster asking paramedics for a Coca-Cola.
The search for Sengül’s mother and others in the apartment block where 70 people lived continued last night.
As he was being stretchered to an ambulance, the little girl’s father pleaded: ‘I also have a wife. Find my wife.’
The pair were among a handful of survivors found yesterday, offering a glimmer of hope to families praying that their loved ones are still alive. But most searches for survivors have become operations to recover bodies as the hours tick by in subzero overnight temperatures.
The official death toll from Monday’s main earthquake and later tremors passed 25,000 in Turkey and Syria yesterday. Another 80,000 have been injured and more than a million have been left homeless in Turkey alone.
But in another inspiring story, an entire family of five were rescued after spending 129 hours under a mound of debris in the town of Nurdag in Gaziantep province. Searchers first pulled out mother Havva Alslan and her daughter Fatmagul from the ruins of their home. The teams later reached father Hasan, but he insisted that his other daughter, Zeynep, and son Saltik Bugra be saved first.
Search teams chanted ‘God is Great!’ as Hasan was brought out last and put in an ambulance.
A girl aged seven and a 13-yearold boy were also found alive in separate rescues as international and local search teams continued their efforts around the clock.
Seven-year-old Irem Bagriacik was rescued after being trapped for 131 hours in her collapsed four-storey apartment in Sarimazi in Adana province, a day after her mother Halime, 27, was found alive beside the bodies of her two other children. Ardur Can Övün, 13, was earlier stretchered away with a drip in his arm after spending 128 hours in his flattened home in Antakya in southeastern Hatay province.
The teenager, who was wrapped in a foil blanket and had his neck in a brace, lifted his hand in thanks to his rescuers as he emerged.
Kamil Can Agas, 16, who was pulled from rubble in Kahramanmaras, the epicentre of the quake, asked: ‘What day is it?’ Searchers embraced after freeing him, as did one of his cousins who cried: ‘He is out, brother. He is out. He is here.’ Volunteers from the British charity Saraid took part in the overnight rescue of a 15-year-old girl in Kahramanmaras after using a listening device to locate her.
Last night, one British expert called the incredible scenes a succession of ‘little miracles’. Surgeon Mansoor Khan, who spent 22 years as an armed forces medic, said: ‘It’s possible to survive for up to 100 hours without water.’
But he said babies were usually more vulnerable to dying in such circumstances than adults, both from exposure to the cold and from dehydration, adding: ‘These babies have been really, really lucky. It’s great to see they have survived. Each one is a little miracle.
‘If it had been 40C in the day, you would survive only a day or two.’
Professor Khan added that they would probably have died of cold had they not been buried in rubble, which has insulated them at night.
Menekse Tabak, 70, was swaddled in a blanket while carried to an ambulance in Kahramanmaras, and Masallah Cicek, 55, was found in the debris of her Diyarbakır home.
Meanwhile, it emerged that a Syrian baby girl whose mother died giving birth to her while trapped under the rubble has been named Aya, Arabic for ‘a sign from God’.
She was found with her umbilical cord still connected to her dead mother in a wrecked five-storey apartment building in Jinderis.
Her father and four siblings were also killed, leaving Aya orphaned. Thousands of people around the world offered to adopt her, but she will be taken in by her father’s uncle.