Hatay (southern Turkey) -

4 days after the catastrophe of the devastating earthquake that struck southern Turkey and northern Syria, the Syrian media activist Fadi al-Halabi is still hoping that his family, trapped under the rubble of his house in the Turkish state of Hatay, will get out, which has become one of the most severely damaged areas in the country. Lives and homes.

Al-Halabi, who is in Syria, said in a post on social media that news had reached him that members of his family had been recovered alive from the rubble, and that they were in a Hatay hospital, before he discovered that this was not true.

Communication platforms

Through social networking sites and WhatsApp groups, dozens of Syrians in Syria and Turkey launched distress calls and urgent appeals to find their missing relatives since the first day of the devastating earthquake, after communication with them was cut off, and their fate was not known until this moment.

These collections were filled with dozens of photos of Syrian children, the elderly, and young men who have gone missing, at a time when rescue teams have been struggling since last Monday to reach neighborhoods under the rubble of buildings.

There is no official statistics yet for the number of Syrian victims of the earthquake in the Turkish province of Hatay, which is adjacent to the Syrian province of Idlib, amid estimates that the number may have exceeded two thousand.

Syrians, Turks, and rescuers await any news about their missing relatives in Hatay, southern Turkey (Al-Jazeera Net)

the end of the world

The Syrian refugee, Hussein, said that he arrived in the state of Hatay 3 days ago from Gaziantep in search of his missing brother, and that he had been waiting since his arrival in front of the building where his brother was staying in the hope that he would come out alive, indicating that he would not leave the place before revealing his fate despite the diminishing chances of his survival.

Hussein added - in an interview with Al-Jazeera Net - that he tried to contact his brother minutes after the earthquake occurred without obtaining a response, and he kept trying dozens of times to contact him to no avail, which prompted him to communicate with his brother's friends who confirmed that he did not know his fate.

The Syrian refugee - who spends the night in his car in front of the ruins of his brother's residence - indicated that the scenes of destruction around him are like movies of the end of the world, pointing out that dozens of buildings around him were flattened and turned into rubble and piles of stones and dust.

Syrians receive the bodies of their relatives who died in the Turkish earthquake at the Bab al-Hawa crossing (Al-Jazeera Net)

Funerals don't stop

On the other side of the border, Syrians began to receive the bodies of their relatives who died in the Turkish provinces hit by the devastating earthquake, in a scene of sadness and sympathy.

And near Bab Al-Hawa border with Turkey, Othman Al-Abdullah received the body of his elderly father, Abdulaziz, who died in the collapse of his house in Hatay state, before he collapsed crying over the body of his father, whom he had not met for 5 years.

The director of the media office at the Bab al-Hawa border crossing with Turkey, Mazen Alloush, said that the bodies of about 580 Syrian refugees who were victims of the earthquake arrived at the crossing from Turkish territory to be handed over to their families.

Alloush added - in an interview with Al-Jazeera Net - that the funeral cars of the Syrians arrive successively every half hour, loaded with new victims, who are transported through the crossing to the opposition-controlled areas in northwestern Syria.