Turkey-Syria earthquake: Boy, 14, pulled from rubble 260 hours after first tremor

Turkish rescuers pulled a 14-year-old boy, two men and a mother of two from the rubble today, nearly 11 days after a major earthquake devastated the region, as rescue efforts wane and the death toll tops the 43,000.

Osman, 14, was rescued 260 hours after the magnitude 7.8 tremor struck southeastern Turkey and Syria, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said on Twitter.

He shared a picture of the wide-eyed teenager on a stretcher and said Osman had been taken to hospital in Antakya, in the devastated Hatay province.

Rescuers found Osman after hearing sounds in the rubble, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported, and were able to pull him out alive.

Osman was found alive after rescuers recovered 17 bodies from the same building.

In Kahramanmaras, Neslihan Kilic, a 29-year-old mother of two, was pulled from the rubble of a building after being trapped for 258 hours.

Pictured: An excavator digs through piles of rubble in Turkey on February 17.

An hour later, rescuers elsewhere saved two men aged 26 and 33 in Antakya, Koca said, also sharing footage of the men receiving treatment from health workers.

The DHA news agency named the men as Mehmet Ali Sakiroglu, 26, and Mustafa Avci, 33, and said they had been rescued from the rubble of the same building.

“I’m fine, there are no problems,” Avci said during a call to a loved one in a video shared by Koca. The invisible man on the other end of the line collapses before Avci asks, “How are my mother and the others?”

‘They’re all good, they’re waiting for you,’ the man on the other end of the line shouts, as a small smile of relief appears on Avci’s face.

In Kahramanmaras, Neslihan Kilic, a 29-year-old mother of two, was pulled from the rubble of a building after being trapped for 258 hours.

They found her when a forklift operator lifted her bed and felt her hand move, the private DHA news agency reported Thursday night.

His father, Cuma Yalcinoz, had been waiting outside the building. “I thought it would come out,” he said. ‘I had a feeling.’

Kilic’s husband and children were still missing.

The quake has killed more than 43,000 people in Turkey and Syria, injured tens of thousands and left millions without shelter in freezing temperatures.

The tremor hit 11 provinces of Turkey. Turkish authorities have said that rescue efforts have been completed in three provinces, Adana, Kilis and Sanliurfa.

A total of 143 trucks carrying aid from Turkey to northwestern Syria have crossed the border since February 9, a United Nations official said.

Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told reporters in Geneva on Friday that the trucks were carrying a “multitude” of items from six UN agencies, including tents, mattresses, blankets, winter clothing, cholera test kits. , essential medicines and food from the World Food Program.

They crossed through the Bab al-Hawa and Bab al-Salameh border gates, he said.

Meanwhile, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, FAO, said it was working closely with the government of Turkey to determine the steps needed to rehabilitate infrastructure in the agricultural sector damaged by the earthquake, including irrigation systems, roads, markets and storage capacity.

“In Syria, FAO’s rapid assessments of earthquake-affected areas suggest major disruption to crop and livestock production capacity, threatening immediate and long-term food security,” the Rome-based agency said in a statement.

A second tragedy struck a family on Friday when five Syrian children and their parents were killed when fire ripped through a Turkish home they had moved into after surviving last week’s earthquake, local media reported.

The family had moved to the central region of Konya from the Turkish city of Nurdagi, which was badly affected by the earthquake on February 6, to stay with relatives.

The state-run Anadolu news agency said the five children were between the ages of four and 13.

Bulldozers tear down damaged houses in Samandag, Turkey, February 17, 2023

Abdulrahman, 67, gestures near his destroyed home where he lost his family and waits for his sister’s body to be pulled from the rubble, after the deadly earthquake, in Antakya, Turkey, February 17, 2023. .

Turkey’s Health Minister Fahrettin Koca visits 14-year-old Osman Halebiye, rescued from under the rubble of a collapsed building 260 hours after earthquakes struck Hatay.

Pictured: An aerial view of the city of Adiyaman on Thursday night.

‘We saw the fire but we couldn’t intervene. A girl was rescued from the window,” Muhsin Cakir, a local resident, told Anadolu.

The 11 Turkish regions affected by the quake and its almost 5,000 aftershocks are home to more than 1.74 million refugees, according to the United Nations.

Turkey is home to almost four million Syrians in total.

Mazen Allouch, an official on the Syrian side of the Bab al-Hawa border crossing with Turkey, told AFP on Friday that the bodies of 1,528 Syrians killed in the quake have so far been repatriated.