Nearly a week since the Turkey-Syria earthquakes, Hassan Guntekin continues to cling to the hope that his wife, three children and mother-in-law may still be alive under rubble in the Turkish city of Antakya.
Faraan: “I need my three children to be rescued. Even if only one of my kids survives, it will be a hope for me to continue living,” he told Al Jazeera. “Otherwise, there is no point to keep on living. I don’t know what I will do. Who will call me dad during Eid?” The Antakya resident said the Turkish government has “failed” in its response to the quakes.
“They are so disorganised and can’t work at all. It is the sixth day and every day two different teams take part in the rescue,” he said. “I haven’t seen any officials here, neither from the government nor from the mayor’s office. I don’t want to see them anyway. They don’t come here because they know we don’t want to see them.” Rescuer wearing a hat with a light stands in front of a hill of rubble with many more rescuers on top of it, in the background. It is nighttime.
Rescuers pulled a seven-month-old baby and a teenage girl from the rubble, nearly a week after earthquakes devastated southeastern Turkey. The infant was rescued in the city of Hatay more than 140 hours after the quake, state media reported, while Esma Sultan, 13, was pulled from the rubble of a building in the city of Gaziantep. In the city of Kahramanmaras – the epicentre of Monday’s 7.8-magnitude tremor – a 70-year-old woman was also saved. “Is the world there?” Menekse Tabak asked as she was pulled out from the concrete to applause and cries praising God, according to a video on state broadcaster TRT Haber.
UN relief chief Martin Griffith says the death toll from the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria could “double or more” from its current levels. Commenting on the number of deaths, he told Sky News: “I think it is difficult to estimate precisely as we need to get under the rubble but I’m sure it will double or more.” “We haven’t really begun to count the number of dead,” he said. Officials and medics said 24,617 people were killed in Turkey and more than 3,500 in Syria. The confirmed total now stands at more than 28,000.
