A baby who was born under rubble was saved from the wreckage of her family home in northern Syria on Tuesday morning as stories of miracle rescues emerged in the aftermath of Monday’s catastrophic earthquake.
The baby girl, whose umbilical cord was still attached as rescue teams carried her out of her collapsed home, was rushed to a nearby hospital.
Neither of her parents, nor her four siblings survived, according to locals who witnessed her rescue in Jandaris, a small town in northern Syria with an estimated 25 per cent reduced to rubble.
A widely-shared video showed the new-born baby being cradled and rushed to safety past rubble and diggers.
Elsewhere, in the Syrian village of Qatma, three small, dust-covered toes, poking through the broken iron rods in a mound of rubble offered a glimmer of hope to Syrian rescuers as they raced to rescue another young boy.
Ahmed, a child of about four or five years old, was trapped by a giant, concrete slab as his home pancaked and crumbled when the earthquake struck in the early hours of Monday morning as he slept in his bed.
In a dramatic video released by the Syrian White Helmets, rescuers can be seen shouting urgent instructions to each other over the hammering of a pneumatic drill as they try to extract him from his terrifyingly cramped prison under precarious debris. Against the odds, they pull the boy free.
He is visibly in pain, scratched and caked in mud and blood, letting out a feeble cry as he cradled by a rescue worker and carried to safety. Ahmed is later seen on a stretcher, fitted with an oxygen mask as an ambulance rushes him to hospital. A medic by his side quietly comforts him with the word “yalla”, or “come on.”
Little is known about Ahmed or his family, beyond reports that his family had already been displaced by Syria’s brutal war to the village of Qatma, north of Aleppo.
The story of his rescue highlights the plight of millions of Syrians now hit by the twin catastrophes of years of conflict and a sudden natural disaster.
Tragically, many children could not be saved from the devastation of the worst earthquake to hit the Turkish-Syrian border in a century.
In another heartbreaking video from Jindires, northern Syria, a father is seen dropping to his knees and sobbing over the body of his baby son, kissing his forehead as bystanders try to offer comfort.
In the chaotic aftermath of the disaster, trapped victims began using social media to plead for help, prompting Kagan Sarikaya, a Turkish political scientist, to collect the information and create a map of their location, reported the Middle East Eye.
For some families, social media posts may have saved their lives. “Help, we are under the rubble, my mother and my brother,” said one man in Twitter post, pinpointing his address. As the post went viral, the family was rescued by neighbours.
In another video uploaded from Malatya, near one of the earthquake’s epicentre in Turkey, relieved rescue workers also celebrated another successful extraction of a three year old boy, smiling and kissing his cheek as they carefully passed him up to each other from a hole in the ground.
In Gaziantep, four people were rescued alive from the rubble of a building by rescuers working with their bare hands. They emerged shocked but relatively unscathed from a narrow gap that had been cleared from under a collapsed wall that may have saved their lives.
Source: telegraph.co.uk