Exhausted rescuers pulled dwindling numbers of survivors from earthquake rubble in Türkiye and Syria on Saturday five days after one of the region’s worst natural disasters whose death toll neared 26,000 and looked set to rise far higher.

In Kahramanmaras, close to the epicentre in south Türkiye, there were fewer visible rescue operations amid the smashed concrete mounds of fallen houses and apartment blocks where trucks rumbled through streets shipping out debris.

The death toll kept growing – exceeding 25,300 across southern Türkiye and northwest Syria. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, facing questions over earthquake planning and response time, has said authorities should have reacted faster.

Erdogan promised to start rebuilding cities within weeks, saying hundreds of thousands of buildings were now uninhabitable, while issuing stern warnings against looters.

In the Turkish city of Antakya, several residents and rescue workers said they had seen looting.

In the rebel enclave of northwest Syria that suffered the country’s worst damage from the earthquake but where relief efforts are complicated by civil war, very little aid had entered despite a pledge from Damascus to improve access.

In Antakya, body bags lay on streets and residents wore masks against the smell of death.

Inhabitants joined official rescuers.

“There is chaos, rubble and bodies everywhere,” said one, whose group had worked overnight trying to reach a university teacher calling to them from the rubble.

By morning, she had stopped responding to them, he said.

“There are still collapsed buildings untouched in the side streets,” he added.

At one building in Kahramanmaras, rescuers burrowed between concrete slabs to reach a five year-old girl, lifting her on a stretcher, wrapped in foil, and chanting “God is great”.

They said they believed two more survivors were clinging on under the same mound of rubble.

But though several other people were reportedly saved from the rubble on Saturday including 13 year-old Arda Can Ovan, few rescue efforts were resulting in such success.

The dangers were evident in a video filmed in Hatay in Türkiye, showing a partially collapsed building suddenly slipping and burying a rescuer in an avalanche of debris before his colleagues could haul him out.

Two German rescue organisations suspended work on Saturday, citing reports of clashes between groups of people and gunfire. An Austrian team also briefly suspended work before resuming.

About 80,000 people were being treated in hospital, while 1.05 million left homeless by the quakes were in temporary shelters, Türkiye said.

Source: SABC News