Residents digging through a collapsed building in a northwestern Syrian town discovered a crying baby whose mother appears to have given birth while buried under rubble from this week’s devastating earthquake, relatives and a doctor said Tuesday.
The newborn girl’s umbilical cord was still connected to her mother, Afraa Abu Hadiya, who was dead, they said. The baby was the only member of her family to survive the building collapse Monday in the small town of Jinderis, along the Turkish border, Ramadan Sleiman, a relative of hers, told The Associated Press.
The magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck before dawn on Monday, followed by multiple aftershocks, causing widespread destruction in southern Turkey and northern Syria. Thousands have been killed, with the number of victims increasing as more bodies are discovered. But there have also been dramatic rescues. Elsewhere in Jinderis, a girl was found alive, buried in concrete under the rubble of her home.
The newborn baby was rescued on Monday afternoon, more than 10 hours after the earthquake. After rescuers pulled her out, a neighbor cut the cord, and she and others rushed the baby to a children’s hospital in the nearby city of Afrin, where she was kept in an incubator, the doctor treating the patient said. the baby, Dr. Hani Maaruf.
Video of the rescue circulating on social media shows the moments after the baby was pulled from the rubble, as a man picks her up, umbilical cord still dangling, and runs away as another man throws a blanket over her. wrap it up
The baby’s body temperature had dropped to 95 degrees Fahrenheit and she had bruises, including a large one on her back, but she is stable, he said.
Abu Hadiya must have been conscious during the delivery and must have died soon after, Maarouf said. He estimated that the baby was born several hours before it was found, given the amount of temperature it had dropped. If the girl had been born just before the quake, she would not have survived so many hours in the cold, he said.
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“If the girl had been there an hour longer, she would have died,” he said.
When the earthquake struck before dawn on Monday, Abu Hadiya, her husband and their four children apparently tried to run out of their apartment building, but the structure collapsed on them. Their bodies were found near the building’s entrance, said Sleiman, who arrived at the scene just after the newborn was discovered.
“They found her in front of her mother’s legs,” he said. “After the dust and rocks were removed, the girl was found alive.”
A baby born under the rubble caused by an earthquake in Syria receives treatment inside an incubator at a children’s hospital in Afrin, Syria, on February 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Ghaith Alsayed)
Maarouf said the baby weighed 7 pounds, an average weight for a newborn, making it near-term. “Our only concern is the bruise on her back, and we have to see if there is a problem with the spinal cord,” she said, saying that she has been moving her legs and arms normally.
Jinderis, located in the rebel enclave of northwestern Syria, was hit hard by the quake, with dozens of buildings collapsing.
Abu Hadiya and his family were among the millions of Syrians who fled into rebel-held territory from other parts of the country. They were originally from the village of Khsham in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour, but left in 2014 after the Islamic State group captured their village, said a relative who gave his name as Saleh al-Badran.
In 2018, the family moved to Jinderis after the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, an umbrella for several insurgent groups, captured the town from US-backed Kurdish fighters, Sleiman said.
On Tuesday, Abu Hadiya and the girl’s father, Abdullah Turki Mleihan, along with their four other children were buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of Jinderis.
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Back inside the city, rescue operations were still ongoing in his building in the hope of finding any survivors.
The city saw another dramatic rescue Monday night, when a young child was pulled alive from the rubble of a collapsed building. Video from the White Helmets, the region’s emergency service, shows a rescuer digging through crushed concrete amid twisted metal until the girl, named Nour, emerged. The girl, still half buried, looks up in a daze as she is told, “Daddy is here, don’t be scared… Talk to your daddy, he talks.”
A rescuer cradled her head in his hands and tenderly wiped the dust from around her eyes before she was removed.
The earthquake has caused further devastation in the opposition-controlled area, centered on the Syrian province of Idlib, which had already been battered by years of war and strained by an influx of people displaced by the country’s civil war, which began in 2011.
The earthquake on Monday killed hundreds of people in the area, with the death toll rising steadily and hundreds still believed to be lost under the rubble. The quake totally or partially demolished more than 730 buildings and damaged thousands more in the territory, according to the White Helmets, as the area’s civil defense is known.
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The White Helmets have years of experience in removing victims from buildings destroyed by shelling by Russian warplanes or Syrian government forces. An earthquake is a new disaster for them.
“Both are catastrophes, a catastrophe that has been going on for 12 years and the criminal has not been held accountable, and this is a natural catastrophe,” said White Helmets deputy chief Munir Mustafa.
Asked if there was any difference between the rescue work in the earthquake and during the war, he said: “We cannot compare death with death… What we are witnessing today is death on death.”
