Woman found alive under rubble in southern Turkey nine days after earthquake
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Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, has vowed to rebuild southern Turkey and insisted that rescue operations will continue, as a woman was pulled from rubble more than nine days after the earthquake.
Speaking to the Turkish cabinet Mr Erdogan, who has faced criticism for a slow response to last week’s deadly earthquakes, said: “We will continue our work until we remove the last citizen left under the collapsed buildings.”
“We will rebuild all the houses and workplaces, destroyed or made uninhabitable by the earthquake, and hand them over to the rightful owners,” Mr Erdogan added.
Rescue work continued on Wednesday, including near-miraculous cases where survivors have lived for an entire week in cavities beneath their collapsed homes.
The death toll from the earthquake, which struck both southern Turkey and northwestern Syria, already stands at 40,000 but is likely to rise even higher in the coming days.
Among the newly discovered survivors was a 42-year-old woman called Melike Imamoglu, from Kahramanmaras, one of the worst affected areas, who had been trapped for more than 222 hours.
Video footage showed rescue workers carrying Ms Imamoglu strapped onto a stretcher, to an ambulance.
It is becoming increasingly rare to find survivors, however.
In northwestern Syria, which was also devastated by the earthquake, the White Helmet rescue team posted a video of two of their workers quietly weeping over the body of a child.
She had been pulled from rubble but then succumbed to her injuries while being driven to hospital.
There was also grim news from the province of Antakya, where the body of a member of Turkey’s national handball team, Cemal Kütahya, was found alongside her dead five-year-old son.
Recovery operation
UN officials have said that rescue operations overall are beginning to wind down in both countries, with the focus shifting to recovering the bodies of victims.
Ayman Safadi, the foreign minister of Jordan, is travelling to Damascus on Wednesday to show “solidarity” with the victims before making a similar visit to Turkey.
Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, is a global pariah over his litany of war crimes during the country’s decade-long civil war.
It will be the first such visit by a Jordanian foreign minister since the outbreak of the war, and comes as the Assad regime uses the earthquake as leverage in securing sanctions relief from the West.
