A MOTHER and her 10-day-old baby have been rescued after spending more than 90 hours under the earthquake rubble in Türkiye.
His eyes wide open, baby Yagiz Ulas was pulled from the ruins of a flattened building in Samandag in Hatay province early yesterday morning.
Images show the infant being carried from the rubble towards a waiting ambulance, a sight described by local media as ‘miraculous’. The newborn’s mother was carried away from the building debris on a stretcher.
Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, 52, said the pair spent almost four days under the rubble.
A three-year-old named Zeynep Ela Parlak was also pulled out from the rubble in Hatay last night, almost 100 hours after the quake, according to Turkish news outlet Anadolu Agency.
The rescue of a number of small children has lifted the spirits of weary crews searching for survivors on the fifth day after the earthquake struck Türkiye and Syria, killing more than 22,000 people.
At least seven children, including 18-month-old Yusuf Huseyin, were rescued yesterday, videos released by disaster services showed, their astonishing survival inspiring search crews who also saved several trapped adults.
The rescuers, including specialist teams from dozens of countries, toiled through the night in the ruins of thousands of wrecked buildings. In freezing temperatures, they regularly called for silence as they listened for any sound of life from mangled concrete mounds.
In the Turkish town of Kahramanmaras, 200km north of Samandag, orange-clad workers squeezed into an air pocket beneath a fallen building to find a toddler, crying as dust fell into his eyes, before relief settled over him and rescuers gently brushed his face clean, video from the Turkish defence ministry showed.
Further to the east of Türkiye, the fearful face of another boy looked out from a pancaked building, his cries rising above the sound of the drills and grinders trying to free him yesterday morning in the Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakir. After opening a wider hole, workers placed an oxygen mask on his face and carried him to safety. Like baby Yagiz, he was followed by his mother, on a stretcher, 103 hours after the disaster struck.
And across the border in Syria, rescuers from the White Helmets group used bare hands to dig through plaster and cement until reaching the bare foot of a young girl, wearing pink pyjamas now grimy from days trapped, but alive and free at last.
A family of six, including four children, were pulled out from a collapsed building in Iskenderun, also in Hatay, after spending 101 hours beneath the rubble.
Experts say 90 per cent of survivors under the rubble are found in the first 72 hours, a window that closed early Thursday morning.
Türkiye’s disaster management agency said more than 19,300 people had been confirmed killed so far, with more than 77,000 injured in the country.
More than 3,300 have been confirmed dead in Syria, bringing the total number of dead to more than 22,000.
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