On Ataturk Avenue in Antakya, a lone mountaineering tent is perched next to a mangled heap of iron rebars and concrete. Men in bright orange and yellow luminescent jackets can be seen rushing up and down the debris.

Nearby, excavators are digging into the rubble of multiple buildings that collapsed into each other on the fateful night of February 6, when a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck southern and southeastern Türkiye, killing more than 40,000 people.

The tent was erected by Mustafa Kazazz, a 25-year-old man with broad shoulders and trimmed hair. For the past two fortnights, he has barely strayed away from his tent — his dirt-stained pants and worn-out boots poked with holes bear testament to his determination.

“We have found someone’s limb. We’ll keep you posted with more updates,” was the latest update Kazazz received from two men from AFAD, Türkiye’s disaster management agency, on the morning of February 21.

Mustafa Kazazz refuses to budge from the site of a collapsed building – he’ll leave only with the bodies of his family members. (Saad Hasan / TRTWorld)

Antakya, the largest district in  Hatay, was one of the province’s worst hit. And Kazazz lost his entire family — his father, mother, two sisters and brother.

Even with all the heavy-duty machines and modern devices, locating and extracting bodies is a long, arduous process. AFAD teams have first to remove debris piece by piece, ensuring heavy concrete slabs remain intact. One wrong step can destabilise the concrete wreckage and crush the bodies stuck underneath.

The earthquakes of magnitudes 7.7 and 7.6 have left in their wake stories of pain, grief and longing.

Tens of thousands of survivors are living in tents. Many have moved to other cities. Authorities have dug out thousands of bodies and buried hundreds of unidentified ones. The search for missing people — all presumed dead by now — continues.

Across the district, government and relief organizations have set up temporary tent cities with hundreds of kitchens and mobile toilets. Lentils and beans are made in large pots, and tea is distributed from kiosks run by different municipalities.

While bodies are being pulled out in the absence of their next of kin, Kazazz refuses to leave his family members behind in the mountain-high pile of debris. For him, time stopped at 4:17 am on February 6.

Mustafa Kazazz used a sledgehammer to single-handedly dig a tunnel through the rubble of his family’s home. Despite his heroic efforts, he was only able to recover the bodies of his mother and sister. (TRTWorld)

Kazazz is a translator and works in Trabzon as a tour guide — a somewhat better-paying job than he would have found in Antakya that has helped him save enough money to support his family from afar.

Upon hearing the news of the twin earthquakes, he drove back to his hometown with a friend in a rented car and reached the seven-story residential building where his family lived — on the first floor — within a day. He pushed through the chaos and traffic jams while information about the scale of the disaster slowly trickled in.

“I found a sledgehammer and frantically began to dig a hole,” he says. Kazazz was able to find the bodies of his mother and one sister — those were the only ones his bulky body allowed him to reach as he crawled into crevices in the rubble.

He attended the funeral of his mother and sister, who were buried in a government-managed graveyard carved out for the earthquake victims in the Narlica neighborhood.

At times, Kazazz finds himself hoping against hope, convincing himself that his brother might still be alive underneath the rubble.

“My brother is a strong guy. I know he can make it,” he says, his voice drowned by the noise of the excavators and other digging machines being used by AFAD to break heavy concrete slabs.

Although the window of opportunity for rescues closed over a week ago, Kazazz’s hope to see his brother alive is a clear symptom of his grief.

Just two days before the disaster hit the nation, Kazazz had come to see his family in Antakya after an absence of two long years. “I couldn’t come here often enough because I was the one making a living and supporting the household,” he says.

Despite the danger, Mustafa Kazazz remains steadfast in his determination to give a proper burial to his loved ones who are still lost in the rubble. (TRTWorld)

His mother had found a match for him named Fatima. The duo got engaged during the last week of January. On his short visit just before the earthquakes, he and his mother went shopping for gold and discussed other arrangements for his forthcoming marriage.

He returned to Trabzon on February 5 — a day before the earthquakes struck.  His would-be bride also died, and her body was found buried in rubble in another neighborhood.

On February 20, Kazazz stood outside his tent watching AFAD workers pull 11 bodies out from the rubble of a building that had stood next to his family’s home. The bodies were found lying under what would have been a stairwell, indicating that the victims might have attempted to rush out down the stairs, but weren’t able to make it out in time.

Observing the corpses, Kazazz felt he might be getting closer to giving his remaining family members proper burials. But a few hours later, when yet another earthquake struck Hatay on Monday evening, shaking the broken buildings and debris left behind by the initial quakes just two weeks earlier, workers excavating the rubble of his home ran for their lives — as did everyone else.

“I lost my whole family in one day… Allah, please don’t do this to someone else,” he says, breaking into tears as a gust of wind blows dirt into the air.

By Wednesday afternoon, he was standing his ground, steadfast in his commitment to finding the bodies of his loved ones. But no word came from the AFAD workers as they continued removing the debris with care.

“My mother wanted me to get married so badly. She wanted to see her grandchildren,” he says. “I wasn’t able to fulfill her wish. I will live with that regret for the rest of my life.”

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In the afternoon of that day when a series of earthquakes ripped through Turkey and Syria, Dr Hany Maarouf, 43, returned to his duties at the Jehan Hospital in Afrin, in Syria’s northwest, having made sure his wife and seven children were safe.

At about 3pm, a man and woman ran in, the man holding in his arms a small bundle, shouting that they needed a paediatrician. Their faces showed panic that had turned to despair. This was the sixth hospital they had run to with their precious bundle – baby Aya, who had just been born in the rubble of a collapsed building to a mother who had died.

A miracle in the rubble

Assuring them that he was a paediatrician, Maarouf gently took the baby from them but what he saw “terrified” him.

“I wasn’t sure she was even alive – she was pale, cold, silent. Her limbs were blue and her body was covered with bruises,” he recalled.

Then a faint pulse was discovered and he and his team sprang into action. They wrapped the baby with warmed blankets and placed her in an incubator, watching her until she warmed up enough that they were able to find a vein to hook her up to calcium and glucose solutions.

Baby Aya is not a fan of the stethoscope, but it helps the doctors determine that she is doing just fine [Ali Haj Suleiman/Al Jazeera]

The man who had brought her in – her aunt’s husband – and the woman who accompanied him – a neighbour – was relieved that Aya was going to be saved, but the cruel reality of that day meant they could not stay any longer by her side as they had to go find their own families, and possibly count and bury their dead.

Four days after baby Aya was first brought in and named by the hospital staff, Maarouf tells Al Jazeera that she is doing much better and that the hospital team has pulled together to make sure she is well taken care of. Although she still spends the day in an incubator, baby Aya is being breastfed by a volunteer who comes in several times a day, which provides her with the human, skin-to-skin contact babies need to thrive, in addition to the antibodies and nutrients that can only be found in human breast-milk. 

And she has thrived, Maarouf says proudly, adding that she is putting on weight, showing all the positive indicators and all-around doing much better than he had expected. While he, as a father of seven, often finds himself too deeply moved by the baby’s plight to spend too much time at her side, many of the nursing staff visit her, sitting by her incubator and watching her sleep or coo and wave her arms.

Dr Maarouf is proud of how much Aya has thrived but, as a father of seven, he is deeply saddened by her plight [Ali Haj Suleiman/Al Jazeera]

The circumstances of baby Aya’s mother going into labour remain undetermined, but Maarouf says it is very possible for a woman to go into labour due to shock and for the labour to continue to its end regardless. That the rescuers on Monday heard baby Aya’s cries in the rubble and were able to remove her and get her to help within hours was “first and foremost due to God’s mercy”, Maarouf says.

Surprisingly, he adds, it was possible that the extreme cold complicating rescue efforts had played a role in keeping baby Aya alive until she was found. Because of the cold, she went into hypothermia, which is actually a therapy used in neonatal hospitals to save babies whose brains lack oxygen at birth. This would have preserved her brain function until the hospital staff were able to warm her up and start her care.

‘We’ll stay open, no matter what’

When Maarouf reassured baby Aya’s relatives that they would take care of the baby and that they should go check on the rest of their families, he was speaking with the full knowledge of the horror that had struck Afrin that day. And what war-ravaged Syria has been going through for the past 12 years, as he himself was displaced from Maaret al-Naaman to Afrin in 2019.

Dr Maarouf and his family were displaced from Maaret al-Naaman to Afrin in 2019 [Ali Haj Suleiman/Al Jazeera]

He had spent hours in the car with his wife and children on the day of the earthquakes until their house was deemed safe to go back into, and that day they had 40 people sheltering with them because they had nowhere else to go. It was that thought that pushed him to go back to work that day, that someone might need help.

“Us paediatricians, we’re not the heroes of these disasters, not by a long shot,” he told Al Jazeera. “The true heroes are the surgeons, the civil defence people who are literally saving lives every minute under the most horrible circumstances.

“This is not the first disaster to strike this region, God knows, we’ve had years of bombardment and war. Throughout that time, we are the second line of defence, we usually take care of children who need regular care, who have pre-existing conditions, and who still need our care even as walls come falling down. That’s why I said that we would not close the hospital, we would stay open, no matter what.”

Even that was difficult in the first days after the quakes, which have killed more than 21,500 people to date. “The pharmacies closed, the medical depots closed, everything stopped. We were spinning in circles because we don’t have many medicines on hand in the hospital dispensary,” Maarouf said.

The team ran all the necessary checks and were amazed at how well Aya had come through her ordeal [Ali Haj Suleiman/Al Jazeera]

“One of the days, we needed a bit of formula for baby Aya because the volunteer hadn’t come in yet to nurse her. I was at my wit’s end until I remembered that I had a couple of small samples of formula somewhere in my office, so that situation was saved. Now, things are a little better, maybe at 50 per cent.

“But that’s still not good enough. Look at how long we’ve been waiting for any kind of assistance! The border crossings are closed they said, those organisations and the UN. So they all can’t find a helicopter to fly aid into here?”

The northwestern part of Syria is held by forces opposed to President Bashar al-Assad in the country’s 12-year war. It is largely isolated, with only one approved land border crossing used to bring assistance via Turkey to its more than four million residents, most of whom are internally displaced.

No aid crossed the Bab al-Hawa crossing for three days after the earthquake due to extensive road damage in Turkey, but convoys resumed coming through on Thursday. The needs, however, remain enormous, with the World Food Programme warning on Friday it was running out of stock in northwest Syria and appealing for more corridors to be opened.

Many of the nursing staff visit Aya, sitting by her incubator to watch her sleep or coo and wave her arms [Ali Haj Suleiman/Al Jazeera]

In spite of the anger and sadness at the situation, or perhaps because of an inner resilience that has been built up over years of successive disaster for the region, he speaks in a remarkably calm voice and with a deep empathy for what everyone around him is going through.

Her aunt’s husband has come to visit baby Aya since, but it does not seem like the family is in any condition to come to take her in just yet, Maarouf said. And that is just fine with him, all the folks at Jehan Hospital are happily tending to baby Aya for as long as it takes.

The post ‘Miracle’ baby born in the rubble as her mother died beside her appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.

The magnitude-7.8 and -7.6 quakes happened only hours apart on Monday and brought down entire apartment blocks in multiple cities. The death toll has exceeded 5,400 in Turkey and 1,800 in neighboring Syria.

Following the disaster, throngs of trapped victims utilized social media to reach out for help and pinpoint their locations for rescuers.

Firat Yayla, a YouTuber known as Charmquell, was one of them.

He said in a video posted on his Instagram Stories early on Tuesday after the first earthquake he was stuck under the rubble in the central Antakya district of Hatay province and pleaded with his followers to save him.

“Friends, we are stuck under the earthquake,” he said in the video shot in a dark space. “Mother! Are you okay? Mother! Tell me you hid somewhere. Please help!” he added before ending the video with his home address.

He updated his Instagram later saying he had been saved, but his mother remained under the concrete.

A young man in another video trapped under debris in the Iskenderun district of Hatay shared his address and said, “If you love your God, please come and save us.”

The video was widely shared on Twitter.

Hatay is one of the Turkish provinces worst hit by the disaster. The airport is damaged and closed, making it harder for aid and rescue teams to reach the flattened city.

Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority said 5,775 buildings had been destroyed in the quake, and more than 20,400 people were injured.

Rocked while sleeping

Boran Kubat, a 20-year-old who studies in Istanbul, was visiting relatives in Malatya city when the second earthquake hit his family home.

Kubat said they entered the apartment after the first quake, thinking it was safe, but was caught by the second while sleeping.

He asked for help in a video message posted on social media from under his fallen home where he was trapped with his mother, grandmother, and two uncles.

“Everyone who sees this please come and help us. Now, everyone comes to help us!” he said, describing his address in detail. He said friends immediately reacted and he and his family were rescued.

More than 12,000 Turkish search-and-rescue personnel are working in the affected areas, along with 9,000 troops. Some 70 countries and sending personnel, equipment, and aid.

‘Still shaking’

A man with the Twitter handle Can Turker posted a message on Monday to followers while tagging Turkish government officials. He, his wife, and baby were stuck in The Liwan Hotel in Antakya.

“The stairs collapsed, and we are stuck on the third floor. We are still shaking. Please help,” he pleaded.

Can Turker tweet the next day saying he was saved by his friends without any help from rescue teams?

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – who called it the largest disaster to hit Turkey since a 1938 earthquake in the Elazig province killed more than 33,000 people – declared on Wednesday a three-month state of emergency in the 10 areas hit.

More than 8,000 people have been pulled from the debris in Turkey alone.

But tens of thousands of others are estimated to be stuck under masses of flattened buildings, and many in southeastern Turkey have complained rescue efforts cannot meet the scale of the disaster.

Although there have been lucky people who posted their situation on social media and were rescued, countless messages are still on the internet appealing for assistance – either for themselves under collapsed buildings, or for loved ones who cannot be reached.

It is difficult to know how the situation turned out for most.

The post Turkish victims buried under rubble swarm social media for help appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.

A specialized task force from Vancouver Fire Heavy Urban Search and Rescue was deployed to the scene to assist and confirmed Wednesday morning that they recovered the body overnight.

Four men have already been confirmed to have died in the crash when the crane came down.

That includes brothers Eric and Patrick Stemmer, plus Jared Zook and Cailen Vilness.

All four men were construction workers at the site of a future 25-storey building.

Kelowna RCMP said the fifth victim is believed to have been working in an adjacent building when the crane went down, burying him under the rubble.

“Everyone involved in this tragic scene has worked tirelessly to bring the search for victims to an end,” Insp. Adam MacIntosh of the Kelowna RCMP said in a release. “At this time, we do not believe there are any other persons who were injured or killed as a result of the collapse of this crane. Our deepest condolences go to the family, friends, and coworkers of those who were lost here.”

David Boone with Vancouver Fire Heavy Urban Search and Rescue said they used search dogs and camera equipment to look into void spaces of the rubble and the body was located near the steel from the crane’s operator cab.

An investigation into what happened is now underway.

A number of GoFundMe pages have now been set up for the victims.

The fundraising page for the Stemmer brothers was set up by Emily Roy of Salmon Arm.

The fundraising page for Zook asked for donations so that his parents from the Edmonton area could cover the funeral and other costs.

The fundraiser for Vilness’s family said the 23-year-old was “a prince of a man” and “lived life to the fullest.” Vilness was also set to propose to his girlfriend, the organizers said.

The four confirmed people who died in Monday’s deadly crane collapse 
have been identified through online fundraisers. Above is a photo of 
Cailen Vilness. GoFundMe

The family of the Stemmer brothers, pictured here, is raising money 
via GoFundMe to help the families in this difficult time. GoFundMe

Three of the four confirmed people who died in Monday’s deadly crane 
collapse have been identified through online fundraisers. Above is 
a photo of Jared Zook. GoFundMe

The post 5th body recovered from rubble following deadly Kelowna, B.C., crane collapse appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.