A picture has surfaced, on social media website Twitter, of a seven-year-old Syrian girl and her younger brother trapped beneath the debris. The girl in the picture is seen shielding her younger brother from the falling debris.
The 7 year old girl who kept her hand on her little brother's head to protect him while they were under the rubble for 17 hours has made it safely. I see no one sharing. If she were dead, everyone would share! Share positivity… pic.twitter.com/J2sU5A5uvO— Mohamad Safa (@mhdksafa) February 7, 2023
Both of them were rescued from the rubble of the collapsed building later, where they were trapped for hours.
The image was shared by UN representative Mohamed Safa. He urged people to spread positivity as Syria and Turkey emerge from one of the most dangerous earthquakes to have struck both nations.
“The 7 year old girl who kept her hand on her little brother’s head to protect him while they were under the rubble for 17 hours has made it safely,” Safa said in his tweet.
The death toll in Syria has now risen above 2,000. The Syrian White Helmets who have undertaken rescue operations in the northwestern part of the country said that the death toll has risen above 1,200 in rebel-held areas.
Parts of Syrian cities of Azaz, Aleppo and Hama have been turned into rubble following the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck southern Turkey on Monday.
Another report from the BBC said that a newborn girl was saved by rescuers from underneath the rubble of a building in Syria. The mother of the newborn child went into labour after the earthquake struck and died during childbirth.
The newborn, extracted from the rubble in Syria’s Jindayris, was orphaned as her father, four siblings and an aunt were also killed in the earthquake. Dramatic images showed a man carrying the child, covered in dust. Doctors from Syria’s Afrin said the child is in a stable condition.
The child’s family’s building was one of the 50 buildings that collapsed in Jindayris due to the earthquake. Earlier, director of the Middle Eastern Institute’s Syrian chapter Charles Lister shared a video and photos of two separate children who were extracted from beneath the rubble.
Those extractions were dubbed ‘miraculous’ as these children were found in precarious conditions, with their lives threatened by collapsing buildings.
Rebel-held northwestern Syria was already suffering due to dilapidated infrastructure as the 12-year-old civil war has adversely impacted the region’s infrastructure. The earthquake now has piled more misery on the region and its residents.
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