February 10, 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake news

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to visit Adiyaman and Malatya provinces on Friday to inspect the areas affected by Monday’s earthquake, Turkish state broadcaster TRT Haber reported.

The provinces are located toward the south of the country, and north of Gaziantep, the epicenter of the 7.8-magnitude quake.

More than 21,000 people have died in Turkey and Syria, and rescue workers are now racing against time to pull survivors from the rubble of collapsed buildings in freezing winter conditions.

At least 78,124 people were injured across both countries, according to authorities.

Two teenage sisters have been rescued in Kahramanmaraş city 101 hours after the massive earthquake hit Turkey, firefighters said.

In a statement Friday, the Antalya Metropolitan Fire Department said Ayfer, 15, was pulled from the rubble in the 99th hour after the quake, and her sister, Fatma, 13, was saved two hours later.

Rescuers using seismic sensors detected signs of life under the debris and conducted a 10-hour rescue operation to reach where Ayfer was located, the statement said. 

The firefighters spoke with Ayfer in an effort to keep her conscious. She said she missed eating ice cream and they promised to get her some when she was out safely.

They also played music that she requested.

The firefighters traveled some 800 kilometers (500 miles) from the city of Antalya to join the rescue efforts in Kahramanmaraş.

Earthquake survivors in Turkey's hard-hit coastal city of Iskenderun say they are losing hope of finding those still missing.

Server Onen said he had spent days searching for his friend under the wreckage of an apartment building in the southern city.

Others, like Suheyl Sumbultepe, have been forced to accept their loved ones are gone.

Sumbultepe, who told CNN he saw his mother’s leg, said, “I’m not able to reach her. She is there. I see her but I cannot touch her. I understand my mother is dead. I am trying to get my mother.” 

“Our government helps but it’s not enough, obviously. So we are trying to get our people by our own,” he said. “We need you. We need everyone who can come and help us.”

Some, like Burak Dik, have been successful in their efforts.

Dik said he flew from London to find his sister and other relatives, who were rescued from under the rubble after 15 hours. He told CNN it’s a miracle they made it out and likened the situation in Turkey to “a very bad dream.”

More than 76 hours after Monday’s devastating earthquake struck southern Turkey, three men emerged alive and uninjured from the rubble in the city of Gaziantep after frantic relatives and neighbors joined the rescue operation to save them.

Mithat Tabur, and his sons Ersin, 30, and Mustafa, 26, were rescued from the wreckage of an eight-story apartment building in the city's Ibrahimli suburb after search teams detected them in what was left of their living room.

Tabur’s wife, Ayer, was located in the kitchen without a heartbeat. Rescue teams are now trying to retrieve her body from under the rubble.  

More than 100 people lived in their building and roughly a quarter of the residents made it out alive.  

Omer Kocok, a relative of the Taburs, told CNN early Wednesday that his cousins were able to make contact with the rescue teams through cell phone calls — giving them signs of life. 

“Ersin was the one who called us for help,” Omer told CNN. 

Omer volunteered to dig, assisting rescue workers in their painstaking work of sifting through the rubble. 

Mustafa’s high school friend, English teacher Alptekin Talanci, said Mustafa was a civil engineer working for the local government. CNN reporters met Talanci outside the collapsed building, where he had been waiting in the cold for two days, hoping his friend would come out alive. 

The day the quake struck, Talanci said it was snowing and he had gone with Mustafa to watch a movie at the cinema.

Talanci credits the survival of the Tabur sons and their father to Ersin’s training as a paramedic.

“He knew how to survive if these kinds of situations happened. He also had his phone with him luckily," Talanci said.

Photos from across southern Turkey and northern Syria show scenes of devastation and suffering as hopes fade of finding survivors more than four days after Monday's massive earthquake struck the region.

More than 21,000 people have died in both countries and rescue workers are now racing against time to pull survivors from the rubble of collapsed buildings in freezing winter conditions.

At least 78,124 people were injured across Turkey and Syria, according to authorities.

A UN aid convoy crossed from Turkey into northwestern Syria on Thursday for the first time since the earthquake hit. The six trucks carrying shelter items and Non-Food Items (NFI) drove through the Bab Al Hawa border crossing, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres said he is open to the idea of delivering aid via additional border crossings, other than the Bab al-Hawa, which is the only humanitarian aid corridor approved by the UN between Turkey and rebel-held areas of northern Syria.

In Syria, the earthquake's devastation heaps misery on top of an existing humanitarian crisis resulting from a more than decade-long civil war.  Millions living in northwest Syria, much of which is controlled by anti-government rebels, were already suffering from the effects of extreme poverty and a cholera outbreak when the quake hit.

Now many are fending for themselves, as many Western nations have refused to send aid directly to the Syrian regime, which is under US and EU sanctions. 

The Syria Civil Defense, known as the White Helmets, has warned that the hope of finding survivors is fading inside the country.

Mousa Zidane, a volunteer with the group told CNN on Thursday that in the aftermath of the quakes, "tens of thousands of families are currently homeless all over northwest Syria."

The cold weather is adding to the catastrophe, he said, as rescue teams struggle to extract people from under the rubble.

In the rebel-held Idlib governorate, a man told AFPTV on Thursday he had been digging through rubble with his hands as he searched for 30 relatives in the village of Besnaya.

Malik Ibrahim, 40, said he had retrieved 10 bodies, after searching for two days without sleep.

"It's ineffable, words fail me, it's tragic," he said. "The whole family is gone, and all our memories are buried with them."

Hundreds of thousands of people in Syria have been left homeless in the middle of winter following Monday's deadly earthquakes. Across northwestern Syria — where temperatures are below freezing — many people are staying in makeshift shelters, mosques and in the ruins of destroyed buildings.

Mousa Zidane, a volunteer with the “White Helmets,” officially known as Syria Civil Defense, told CNN on Thursday that in the aftermath of the quakes, "tens of thousands of families are currently homeless all-over northwest Syria."

Zidane said the cold weather is adding to the catastrophe, as rescue teams struggle to extract people from under the rubble.

People need their homes back and their dead "pulled out and buried," Zidane added. 

When asked about diggers, Zidane said they were not initially available, but a limited number are now working to clear the debris. "Not enough to cover the whole area. We need more," he said. 

Zidane said there is limited access to aid that doesn't cover people's needs in northwest Syria, much of which is controlled by anti-government rebels amid a humanitarian crisis resulting from Syria's more than decade-long civil war. 

With the death toll in Turkey and Syria surpassing 21,000, the earthquake has now marked a grim milestone — it's in the top 10 of deadliest quakes over the past 20 years.

A number of factors have contributed to making this earthquake so lethal. One of them is the time of day it occurred. With the quake hitting early in the morning, many people were in their beds when it happened, and are now trapped under the rubble of their homes.

Additionally, with a cold and wet weather system moving through the region, poor conditions have made reaching affected areas trickier, and rescue and recovery efforts on both sides of the border significantly more challenging once teams have arrived.

The 7.8 magnitude quake earlier this week struck 23 kilometers (14.2 miles) east of Nurdagi, in Turkey’s Gaziantep province, at a depth of 24.1 kilometers (14.9 miles), the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said.

Syria Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets, said they have been working nonstop for more than 90 hours "in very difficult circumstances," to rescue people trapped under rubble following the deadly earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria Monday.

The volunteer organization said they would continue rescue operations in the affected areas of opposition-controlled northern Syria into Friday. However, the organization tweeted a warning that the hope of finding survivors is now "fading." 

The impacted areas include the countryside of Aleppo in northern Syria and the countryside of Idlib in northeastern Syria.