Highlights
Rescuers pulled a woman alive from the rubble of a collapsed building inTurkey on Monday, broadcaster CNN Turk reported, a week after amajor earthquake struck Turkey and Syria killing more than33,000 people.
Sibel Kaya, 40, was rescued in southern Gaziantep province,some 170 hours after the first of two quakes struck the region,the report said. Rescue workers in Kahramanmaras had also madecontact with three survivors, believed to be a mother, daughterand baby, in the ruins of a building.
With chances of finding more survivors growing more remote,the toll in both countries rose above 33,000 on Sunday andlooked set to keep growing. It was the deadliest quake in Turkeysince 1939.
On Sunday, rescue teams from Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Belaruspulled a man alive from a collapsed building in Turkey, about160 hours after the quake struck, Russia’s Ministry of EmergencySituations said.
“Rescue work to remove the man from the rubble lasted morethan four hours,” the ministry said on the Telegram messagingplatform, alongside a video showing rescuers taking a man fromrubble and carrying him away.
“The work was carried out at night with a risk to lifecoming from a possible collapse of structures.”In a central district of one of the worst hit cities,Antakya in southern Turkey, business owners emptied their shopson Sunday to prevent merchandise from being stolen by looters.
Residents and aid workers who came from other cities citedworsening security conditions, with widespread accounts ofbusinesses and collapsed homes being robbed.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has said the governmentwill deal firmly with looters, as he faces questions over hisresponse to the earthquake ahead of an election scheduled forJune that is expected to be the toughest of his two decades inpower.
The quake is now the sixth most deadly natural disaster thiscentury, behind the 2005 tremor that killed at least 73,000 inPakistan.
A father and daughter, a toddler and a 10-year-old girl wereamong other survivors pulled from the ruins of collapsedbuildings in Turkey on Sunday, but such scenes are becoming rareas the number of dead climbed relentlessly.
At a funeral near Reyhanli, veiled women wailed and beattheir chests as bodies were unloaded from lorries - some inclosed wood coffins, others in uncovered coffins, and stillothers just wrapped in blankets.
Some residents sought to retrieve what they could from thedestruction.
In Elbistan, epicentre of an aftershock almost as powerfulas Monday’s initial 7.8 magnitude quake, 32-year-old mobile shopowner Mustafa Bahcivan said he had come into town almost dailysince then. On Sunday, he sifted through rubble searching forany of his phones that might still be intact and sellable.
“This used to be one of the busiest streets. Now it’scompletely gone,” he said.
In Syria, the disaster hit hardest in the rebel-heldnorthwest, leaving homeless yet again many people who hadalready been displaced several times by a decade-old civil war.The region has received little aid compared with government-heldareas.
“We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria,”United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths said on Twitter fromthe Turkey-Syria border, where only a single crossing is openfor U.N. aid supplies.
“They rightly feel abandoned,” Griffiths said, adding thathe was focused on addressing that swiftly.
The United States called on the Syrian government and allother parties to immediately grant humanitarian access to allthose in need.
Earthquake aid from government-held regions into territorycontrolled by hardline opposition groups has been held up byapproval issues with Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)which controls much of the region, a U.N. spokesperson said.An HTS source in Idlib told Reuters the group would notallow any shipments from government-held areas and that aidwould be coming in from Turkey to the north.
The United Nations is hoping to ramp up cross-borderoperations by opening an additional two border points betweenTurkey and opposition-held Syria for aid deliveries,spokesperson Jens Laerke said.
U.N. Syria envoy Geir Pedersen said in Damascus the UnitedNations was mobilising funding to support Syria. “We’re tryingto tell everyone: Put politics aside, this is a time to unitebehind a common effort to support the Syrian people,” he said.
The quakes killed 29,605 people in Turkey and more than3,500 in Syria, where tolls have not been updated for two days.Turkey said on Sunday about 80,000 people were in hospital,and more than 1 million in temporary shelters.
