‘I thought my family died’: Father pulled from earthquake rubble reunited with wife and newborn daughter

Three more earthquake survivors were pulled alive from the rubble in Turkey on Friday – including a father reunited with his wife and his baby daughter, who was born on the night of the disaster.

Mustafa Avci, 34, was rescued after 11 days trapped in the rubble of a hospital in Antakya. “I thought my family died,” he told reporters as baby Almila lay on his chest for the first time. “My wife, my child, I thought they were all dead. God bless everyone. I’m so happy.”

Mustafa was on the ground floor of the clinic when the massive quake struck in the early hours of 6 February. His exhausted wife Bilge, 28, had just given birth by caesarean section and was being treated by doctors on the fourth floor while Mustafa headed outside “for some air”.

While the mother and baby were not seriously injured, Mustafa was buried by a mountain of concrete.

“I was so scared my baby would grow up without a father,” he said. “I experienced both heaven and hell. But thankfully, we got together and our family is complete.”

Bilge said she had crawled from the rubble with her baby. “We were checked out, I’m fine and our baby, too,” she told Turkish news site Sabah. “We will start our second life.”

Also rescued in Turkey on Friday were 14-year-old Osman Halebiye and Mehmet Ali Sakiroglu, 26.

Mosques around the world performed absentee funeral prayers for those who had died in the disaster, which has killed more than 43,000, left millions homeless, and sparked a huge relief effort across Turkey and Syria.

The death toll in Turkey alone now stands at 38,044, making it the worst disaster in modern Turkish history. But this number is expected to shoot up, given that some 264,000 apartments were lost in the quake and many people are still unaccounted for.

In Syria, already shattered by more than a decade of civil war, authorities have reported more than 5,800 deaths. The toll has not changed for days.

The bulk of Syria’s fatalities have been in the northwest, an area controlled by insurgents who are at war with the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad – a conflict that has complicated efforts to aid people affected by the earthquake.

The sides clashed overnight for the first time since the disaster, with government forces shelling the outskirts of Atareb, a rebel-held town badly hit by the earthquake, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on Friday.

As of Friday, 143 trucks of UN aid had crossed into the northwest of Syria, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said. “We are definitely scaling up the cross-border aid operation; there is a plan for more trucks to come every day,” said a spokesperson.