Rescuers in Turkey and Syria battled bitter cold on Tuesday while saving citizens who were trapped under buildings that were shattered by an earthquake, killing almost more than 8,700 people. Moreover, tremors imposed suffering on the border area, already plagued by shock and panic, leaving people amid burning residue to stay warm as international help began to arrive. 

After some extraordinary survival tales emerged, some of the best content is that of a newborn baby being pulled alive from debris in Syria, still attached by her umbilical cord to her mother who passed away in Monday’s temblor. “We heard a voice while we were digging so we cleared the dust and found the baby with the umbilical cord (intact) so we cut it and my cousin took her to the hospital,” Khalil al-Suwadi told the sources. The newborn is now the sole survivor of her close relative, the rest of the family were killed in the rebel-held town of Jindayris. 

The 7.8-magnitude shudder smashed the people as they were fast asleep on Monday, with thousands of flattened structures, uncountable entrapped and impacting millions. A few whole rows of buildings crumpled, leaving some of the heaviest devastation near the epicenter between the Turkish cities of Gaziantep and Kahramanmaras. The annihilation directed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to declare Tuesday a three-month state of emergency in 10 southeastern provinces. 

Many nations including the United States, China, and the Gulf States have committed to aiding and searching teams along with relief supplies and have begun to arrive by air. Yet a feeling of being left to fend for themselves rose among the people who resided in some of the hardest-hit areas.

The problems of these citizens multiplied when a winter blizzard compounded the misery by generating many roads, some of them damaged by the quake and almost impassable, resulting in traffic jams that stretched for kilometres in some regions. The latest toll showed 5,434 people were killed in Turkey and at least 1,872 in Syria, making a collective total of 7,306 fatalities. The World Health Organization alerted that up to 23 million people could be affected by this gigantic earthquake and insisted nations rush help to the disaster zone.