Rescue teams using thermal cameras to locate signs of life are continuing to pull survivors out of mounds of rubble, five days after a major earthquake struck a sprawling border region of Turkey and Syria.
As aid continued to arrive, a 99-member group from the Indian Army’s medical assistance team began treating the injured in a temporary field hospital in the southern city of Iskenderun, where a main hospital was demolished.
″I buried , then I came here,’’ Canbulat said, counting his dead relatives: “My daughter is dead, my sibling died, my aunt and her daughter died, and the wife of her son" who was 8½ months pregnant. A worker with Turkey’s Ministry of Religious Affairs, who did not wish to be identified because of orders not to share information with the media, said that around 800 bodies were brought the cemetery on Friday, its first day of operation. By midday on Saturday, he said, as many as 2,000 had been buried.
In the city of Kahramanmaras, where a stadium was turned into a makeshift camp, survivors walked among hundreds of tents, queued for hot meals and huddled around campfires. The disaster compounded suffering in a region beset by Syria’s 12-year civil war, which has displaced millions of people within the country and left them dependent on aid. The fighting sent millions more to seek refuge in Turkey.
Syrian state TV said Assad and his wife Asma on Saturday morning visited Duha Nurallah, 60, and her son Ibrahim Zakariya, 22, who were pulled out of rubble the night before in the nearby coastal town of Jableh.