Middle-East
Dubai boom sees Russian cash, high rents and reborn projects
Fourteen years after a financial crisis nearly brought Dubai to its knees, several major abandoned real estate projects are finally showing signs of life as part of a new economic boom in the city-state.
As with previous upturns in Dubai, war is a driving force. But this time it’s Russian investors fleeing Moscow’s war on Ukraine, rather than people escaping Mideast battlefields.
“There’s lots of parts of the world where there are real challenges and people looking for a safe haven,” said Richard Waind, group managing director for Betterhomes, a real estate brokerage in the emirate. “I think that’s a safe haven both for the capital but also for their families.”
While there’s no sign the market could be in similar trouble as in 2009, some concerns have started to surface. Skyrocketing rental costs are worsening a cost-of-living squeeze for the foreign workforce that powers the emirate.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury is worried about the amount of Russian money flowing into the real estate market of the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates.
“In theory, there should be significant reputational risk with the UAE apparently acting as a willing bridge, enabling Russian oligarchs to use the Emirates as a waystation between the Russian financial system and that of the West,” said Jodi Vittori, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has written extensively on Dubai being a money-laundering haven.
“But the reality seems to point otherwise,” she said.
Dubai's government and the UAE's Foreign Ministry did not respond to detailed questions from The Associated Press.
It’s hard to overstate just how much the Emirates has changed over the last half century. Since 1968, the seven sheikdoms that make up the UAE have grown from a British protectorate of some 180,000 people to a federation that’s home to more than 9.2 million. Government statisticians say 3.5 million people live in Dubai alone, with an additional 1.1 million who temporarily live in the city or commute there for work each day.
Oil, much of it from Abu Dhabi’s vast reserves, fueled the UAE’s initial modernization. After Dubai began allowing foreign ownership of “freehold” properties in 2002, the world’s tallest building, cavernous malls and sprawling subdivisions emerged from what once were uninterrupted stretches of windblown sand dunes.
Real estate now represents some 10% of Dubai's overall gross domestic product. After a slump due to COVID-19 restrictions, Dubai saw 86,849 residential sales in 2022, beating a previous record of 80,831 set in 2009.
Buyers and renters have filled exclusive neighborhoods such as the Palm Jumeirah, a man-made archipelago in the shape of a palm tree that juts into the Persian Gulf.
The average asking rent for an apartment there is over $67,600 per year, with a villa renting for $276,000 annually, according to real estate firm CBRE. Analysts attribute growth in the luxury market to the wealthy fleeing pandemic restrictions elsewhere.
That pressure has grown even outside the world of the ultra-wealthy. Rents on average across Dubai are up 26.9% year-on-year, even with anti-price-gouging protections. Families living in villas can expect to pay median rents of $76,000 a year.
The sudden increase in rent prompted Gavin Hill, a 34-year-old car salesman from Essex, England, to move with his partner from a villa in the Dubai Hills neighborhood near downtown to a smaller apartment some 20 kilometers (12 miles) south.
“In terms of looking for a new place, previously it was reasonably easy," said Hill, who has moved four times in the six years he has lived in Dubai. "This time it’s a minefield”
Russian money has helped fuel this.
Betterhomes, which has operated here since 1986, saw Russians lead all other nationalities in purchases by non-residents for the first time last year. Other real estate brokers have also acknowledged anecdotally the influence Russians have had.
“Since the crisis in Eastern Europe, we have seen a lot of Russians, a lot of Ukrainians as well, looking to both move their family and and money out there," Waind said.
Dubai has a history of seeking a business advantage in crises like the Arab Spring, COVID-19 and now Russia's war on Ukraine. During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, its new Jebel Ali port repaired ships damaged by explosions and gunfire in the Persian Gulf. The U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq saw wealthy émigrés arrive in Dubai and the wider UAE.
Those booms included what the West would consider dirty money as well. Some of the nearly $1 billion embezzled in the 2010 Kabul Bank scandal in Afghanistan went toward luxury homes on Palm Jumeirah. A cousin of Syrian President Bashar Assad tied to Assad's sanctioned business dealings also owned property there.
It remains unclear how many Russians have bought in Dubai — and whether the purchases involve people fleeing potential conscription into the Russian army or mass purchases that can be the work of money launderers. Unlike in the U.S., where property records are public, Dubai does not offer an easily accessible database of transactions.
A team from the U.S. Treasury stopped in the UAE on a Mideast tour in January.
A senior U.S. official told The Associated Press that the agency is concerned about the Russian money coming into the Dubai real estate market. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity about discussing sanctions.
Already, the Treasury has issued an alert aimed at U.S. commercial real estate stating that Russian oligarchs and their intermediaries could use “highly complex financing methods and opaque ownership structures" to hide illicit funds.
But it remains unclear what, if any, action Treasury would take, considering the defense and economic ties the U.S. has with the Emirates. A global body focused on fighting money laundering put the UAE on its “gray list” over concerns it isn’t doing enough to stop criminals and militants from hiding wealth there.
Once-abandoned projects that are showing new life include the Dubai Pearl, a planned $4 billion luxury development that was supposed to host multiple hotels and apartments in four, 73-story towers. Those plans collapsed during the 2009 financial crisis, brought on by the Great Recession, that forced Abu Dhabi to provide the city-state a $20 billion bailout.
Demolition crews are now bringing down the concrete husk of the Dubai Pearl, though plans for the site remain unclear.
Plans for the development of Palm Jumeirah's forgotten twin, the Palm Jebel Ali, are also being relaunched.
One practice that helped fuel Dubai's 2009 crisis involved speculators buying yet-to-be built properties. “Off-plan” flipping is growing again as initial buyers “are capitalizing on the current market upswing and cashing out with a premium in hand,” local firm Property Monitor said.
That company and others warn that speculative purchasing could lead to another bubble.
“This does suggest a rise in speculative activity, which is a feature of any market that is seeing price rises,” said Scott Livermore, the chief economist at Oxford Economics Middle East.
Hill — the renter from England — would like to buy a place if the market comes down again. But he's cautious after what he's seen in this boomtown.
Dubai "can eat people out and spit them out quite quickly," Hill said. "I’ve seen too many people go crazy and then go bust very, very fast.”
Iranian President Raisi to visit China to shore up ties
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi will meet with his counterpart Xi Jinping during his three-day trip in China starting Tuesday, as the two U.S. rivals seek further cooperation.
China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying made the announcement Sunday, saying Raisi's visit was at Xi's invitation.
Raisi will meet with Xi and their delegations will sign cooperation documents, according to Iran's state news agency IRNA. Meeting with Iranian and Chinese business leaders and Iranian expatriates in China is also part of his itinerary, the report added.
Raisi's visit is expected to deepen ties between the two political and economic partners that are opposed to the U.S.-led Western domination of international affairs.
The two leaders met last September in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, when Xi underscored China's support for Iran.
In December, Raisi pledged to remain committed to deepening the strategic partnership during a meeting with Chinese Vice Premier Hu Chunhua in Tehran.
China is a major buyer of Iranian oil and an important source of investment in the Mideast country. In 2021, Iran and China signed a 25-year strategic cooperation agreement that covered major economic activities from oil and mining to industry, transportation and agriculture.
Both countries have had tense relations with the United States and have sought to project themselves as a counterweight to American power alongside Russia.
Washington has accused Iran of selling hundreds of attack drones to Russia for its war in Ukraine and has sanctioned executives of an Iranian drone manufacturer. At that same time, ties between Moscow and Beijing have grown stronger.
Iran on Saturday celebrated the 44th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution amid nationwide anti-government protests and heightened tensions with the West.
Israeli jets hit militant site in Gaza after rocket attack
Residents of the Gaza Strip said Israeli aircraft launched a series of airstrikes at militant sites in the coastal Palestinian territory early Monday.
The airstrikes appear to be a response to the firing of a rocket by Palestinian militants toward southern Israel Saturday evening. Israeli air defenses intercepted the rocket.
Also Read: Tens of thousands of Israelis join anti-government protests
The Israeli military said the airstrikes targeted an underground rocket manufacturing complex run by Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The Gaza-Israel frontier had been largely quiet in recent months, but there have been intermittent rocket fire and airstrikes influenced by soaring violence between Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
Tens of thousands of Israelis join anti-government protests
Tens of thousands of Israelis took to the street in several cities across the country Saturday, protesting judicial overhaul plans by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Critics say measures introduced by the new hard-line government would weaken the Supreme Court, limit judicial oversight and grant more power to politicians. Protesters say that would undermine democracy.
The rift over the power of courts is deepening as the government is set to introduce some of the legislations in parliament Monday amid calls for partial strikes by businesses and professional groups.
For the sixth week, protesters pressed on with large rallies, with the main one in the central city of Tel Aviv and several smaller gatherings in other cities.
Arab leaders warn Israeli actions threaten regional turmoil
Dozens of leaders and senior officials from Arab and Islamic countries warned on Sunday Israeli actions in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank could worsen regional turmoil, as violence surges between Israel and the Palestinians.
The meeting in Cairo was hosted by the Arab League and attended by President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt, Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas along with many foreign ministers and senior officials.
The high-level gathering came amid one of the deadliest periods of fighting in years in Jerusalem and the neighboring Israeli-occupied territory. Forty-five Palestinians have been killed so far this year, according to a count by The Associated Press. Palestinians have killed 10 people on the Israeli side during that time.
Speakers at the meeting condemned Israel’s “unilateral measures” in Jerusalem and the West Bank in statements, including home demolitions and expanding settlements.
They also condemned visits by Israeli officials to the city’s contested holy site, which is sacred to both Jews and Muslims and has often been the epicenter of Israeli-Palestinian unrest.
There was no immediate comment from Israel's government.
The officials also voiced support for Jordan's role as custodian of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam. The mosque is built on a hilltop in Jerusalem’s Old City that is the most sacred site for Jews, who refer to it as the Temple Mount because it was the site of the Jewish temples in antiquity.
Since Israel captured the site in the 1967 Mideast War, Jews have been allowed to visit but not pray there. Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its undivided capital, while the Palestinians seek east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.
Calling Jerusalem "the backbone of the Palestinian cause," el-Sissi warned of dire repercussions of any Israeli move to change the status quo of the holy site, saying they would “negatively impact” future negotiations to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Also Read: Palestinian man, Israeli child die as bloodshed rises
He said such measures would impede the long-sought after two-state solution to the conflict, which would leave “both parties and the whole Middle East with difficult and grave options.”
El-Sissi, whose country was the first Arab nation to establish diplomatic ties with Israel, called on the international community to “reinforce the two-state solution and create conducive conditions for the resumption of the peace process.”
King Abdullah II also called for Israel to cease its violations and incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
“The region cannot live in peace, stability, and prosperity without any progress made on the Palestinian cause,” he warned.
Ahmed Aboul-Gheit, the secretary-general of the pan-Arab organization, also warned that attempts to partition the Al-Aqsa Mosque and obliterate its Arab and Islamic identity “would fuel endless unrest and violence.”
Abbas, the Palestinian president, said his administration would resort to the United Nations and its agencies and demand a resolution to protect the two-state solution to the conflict.
“The State of Palestine will continue going to international courts and organizations to protect our people’s legitimate rights,” he said.
The ongoing bout of violence has put the region on edge. Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Egyptian, Israeli and Palestinian leaders and urged them to ease tensions.
Israel is run by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new far-right government. Many politicians in Netanyahu’s administration oppose Palestinian independence.
Sunday's meeting in Cairo issued a final statement that condemned what it called “Israeli's systemic policy” that aims at “distorting and changing” Jerusalem’s “Arab and Islamic culture and identity.”
The communique also urged the International Criminal Court to pursue its investigation and hold those responsible for Israel’s alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity accountable.
Turkey detains building contractors as quake deaths pass 33,000
Turkish justice officials targeted more than 130 people allegedly involved in shoddy and illegal construction methods as rescuers extricated more survivors, including a pregnant woman and two small children, six days after a pair of earthquakes collapsed thousands of buildings.
The death toll from Monday’s quakes that hit southeastern Turkey and northern Syria stood at 33,179 on Sunday and was certain to rise as search teams locate more bodies in the rubble. Authorities said more than 92,600 other people were injured in the disaster.
As despair also bred rage at the agonizingly slow rescue efforts, the focus turned to who was to blame for not better preparing people in the earthquake-prone region that includes an area of Syria that was already suffering from years of civil war.
Even though Turkey has, on paper, construction codes that meet current earthquake-engineering standards, they are too rarely enforced, explaining why thousands of buildings slumped onto their side or pancaked downward onto residents.
Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said Sunday that 134 people were being investigated for their alleged responsibility in the construction of buildings that failed to withstand the quakes, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency. He said that three had been arrested pending trial, seven people were detained and seven other were barred from leaving the country.
Bozdag has vowed to punish anyone responsible, and prosecutors have begun gathering samples of buildings for evidence on materials used in constructions. The quakes were powerful, but victims, experts and people across Turkey are blaming bad construction for multiplying the devastation.
Authorities at Istanbul Airport on Sunday detained two contractors held responsible for the destruction of several buildings in Adiyaman, the private DHA news agency and other media reported. The pair were reportedly on their way to Georgia.
One of the arrested contractors, Yavuz Karakus, told reporters Sunday: “My conscience is clear. I built 44 buildings. Four of them were demolished. I did everything according to the rules,” the DHA news agency reported.
Two more people were arrested in the province of Gaziantep suspected of having cut down columns to make extra room in a building that collapsed, the state-run Anadolu Agency said.
A day earlier, Turkey’s Justice Ministry announced the planned establishment of “Earthquake Crimes Investigation” bureaus. The bureaus would aim to identify contractors and others responsible for building works, gather evidence, instruct experts including architects, geologists and engineers, and check building permits and occupation permits.
A building contractor was detained by authorities on Friday at Istanbul airport before he could board a flight out of the country. He had built a luxury 12-story building called Ronesans Rezidans in the historic city of Antakya, in Hatay province. When it went down, it left an untold number of dead. He was formally arrested Saturday.
In leaked testimony published by Anadolu, the man said the building followed regulations and he did not know the building didn’t withstand the quakes. His lawyer suggested the public was looking for a scapegoat.
The detentions could help direct public anger toward builders and contractors, deflecting attention away from local and state officials who allowed the apparently sub-standard constructions to go ahead. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, already burdened by an economic downturn and high inflation, faces parliamentary and presidential elections in May.
Survivors, many of whom lost loved ones, have turned their frustration and anger also at authorities. Rescue crews have been overwhelmed by the widespread damage which has impacted roads and airports, making it even more difficult to race against the clock.
Erdogan acknowledged earlier in the week that the initial response has been hampered by the extensive damage. He said the worst-affected area was 500 kilometers (310 miles) in diameter and was home to 13.5 million people in Turkey. During a tour of quake-damaged cities Saturday, Erdogan said a disaster of this scope was rare, and again referred to it as the “disaster of the century.”
Rescuers, including crews from other countries, continued to probe the rubble in hope of finding additional survivors who could yet beat the increasingly long odds. Thermal cameras were used to probe the piles of concrete and metal, while rescuers demanded silence so that they could hear the voices of the trapped.
A pregnant woman was rescued Sunday 157 hours after the quake in the hard-hit province of Hatay, State-broadcaster TRT said.
HaberTurk television broadcast the live rescue of a 6-year-old boy removed from the debris of his home in Adiyaman. The child was wrapped in a space blanket and put into an ambulance. An exhausted rescuer removed his surgical mask and took deep breaths as a group of women could be heard crying in joy.
Turkey’s health minister, Fahrettin Koca, posted a video of a young girl in a navy blue jumper who was rescued. “Good news at the 150th hour. Rescued a little while ago by crews. There is always hope!” he tweeted.
Rescue workers pulled out a man in Antakya, hours after hearing voices from beneath the rubble. Workers said the man, who appeared to be in his late 20s or 30s, was one of nine still trapped in the building. But when asked whether he knew of any other survivors, he said he hadn’t heard any voices for three days.
The man weakly waved his hand as he was passed hand to hand on a stretcher as workers applauded and chanted, “God is great!”
A team of German and Turkish relief workers rescued an 88-year-old woman alive from rubble in Kirikhan, German news agency dpa reported. The efforts of a team of Italian and Turkish rescuers also paid off when they removed a 35-year-old man from the wreckage in the hard-hit city of Antakya. He appeared to be unscathed as he was transported on a stretcher to an ambulance, private NTV television reported.
Overnight, a child was also freed in the town of Nizip, in Gaziantep, state-run Anadolu Agency reported, while a 32-year woman, was rescued from the ruins of a eight-story building in the city of Antakya. The woman asked for tea as soon as she emerged, according to NTV.
In Kahramanmaras, near the epicenter of the first 7.8 quake that struck early Monday morning, efforts were underway to reach a survivor detected by sniffer dogs beneath a now-pancaked seven-story building, NTV reported.
Those found alive, however, remained the rare exception.
A large makeshift graveyard was under construction in Antakya’s outskirts on Saturday. Backhoes and bulldozers dug pits in the field as trucks and ambulances loaded with black body bags arrived continuously. The hundreds of graves, spaced no more than 3 feet (a meter) apart, were marked with simple wooden planks set vertically in the ground.
Hatay’s airport, whose runway was damaged in the quake, was reopened on Sunday, the transportation ministry announced. That should help somewhat getting help into the region.
The picture is less clear of the plight across the border in Syria.
United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths, visiting the Turkish-Syrian border Sunday, said in a statement that Syrians have been left “looking for international help that hasn’t arrived.”
“We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria. They rightly feel abandoned,” he said, adding, “My duty and our obligation is to correct this failure as fast as we can.”
The first U.N convoy to reach northwest Syria from Turkey was on Thursday, three days after the earthquake.
Before that, the only cargo coming across the Bab al-Hawa crossing on the Turkey-Syria border was a steady stream of bodies of earthquake victims — Syrian refugees who had fled the war in their country and settled in Turkey but perished in Monday’s 7.8 magnitude quake — coming home for burial.
Political disputes have also held up aid convoys sent from areas of northeast Syria controlled by U.S.-backed Kurdish groups to those controlled by the Syrian government and by Turkish-backed rebels who have fought with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces over the years.
The death toll in Syria’s northwestern rebel-held region has reached 2,166, according to the rescue worker group the White Helmets. The overall death toll in Syria stood at 3,553 on Saturday, though the 1,387 deaths reported for government-held parts of the country hadn’t been updated in days.
Palestinian man, Israeli child die as bloodshed rises
An Israeli settler shot and killed a Palestinian in the northern West Bank on Saturday, Palestinian health officials said, while an 8-year-old child died of injuries suffered a day before in a car-ramming attack in Jerusalem.
As night fell, warning sirens sounded in southern Israel when Palestinian militants fired a rocket from the Gaza Strip that was intercepted by Israeli aerial defenses, the Israeli military said. There was no immediate statement from Hamas, the Islamic militant group that rules Gaza.
Saturday's events were the latest escalation in months of surging violence in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.
In the northern West Bank, near Salfit, a farming village of olive groves, video footage showed Israeli settlers racing down the hills and tearing into the town. As Palestinians poured into the streets to see what was going on, an Israeli settler opened fire, killing a 27-year-old villager, said Ghassan Douglas, a Palestinian official who monitors Israeli settlements in the Nablus region. The settlers dispersed when the Israeli military arrived, he said.
The Palestinian Health Ministry identified the villager who was killed as Methqal Rayan and said he was shot in the head. Video shared by the village council shows the settlers firing at least 10 gunshots toward the residents.
Douglas said that the northern West Bank has seen an intense wave of settler violence in recent days. On Friday, he said, just after the car-ramming attack in Jerusalem that killed three Israelis, settlers similarly streamed into the village and stole several sheep from a farmer. Settlers attacked and wounded Palestinians who tried to defend the farmer, he said.
Israeli police opened an investigation into the shooting of the Palestinian, the military said. It said Israeli security forces de-escalated the situation after the Palestinian was taken to the hospital.
In Jerusalem, Asher Menahem Paley, 8, died a day after a Palestinain man rammed a car into a bus stop in an Israeli settlement in the eastern half of the contested capital, which Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war. Shaare Zedek Hospital in Jerusalem announced his death Saturday. His 6-year-old brother was killed in the car-ramming, along with a man in his 20s.
After the attack, Israel's new hard-line government vowed a harsh response. Almost immediately, Israeli police arrested and interrogated the relatives of the suspected assailant, 32-year-old Hussein Qaraqa from the gritty east Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya.
Qaraqa’s family said he was born in Jerusalem but has family in Bethlehem. His uncle, 63-year-old Adnan Qaraqa in Bethlehem, told The Associated Press that his nephew had been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder.
Qaraqa said Hussein's mental problems started in 2008, when he was arrested for the first of several minor offenses. He alleged that Israeli interrogators badly beat Hussein in detention, from which he emerged “irrevocably changed.”
A few years later, Hussein fell from a crane at a construction site, his uncle said, sustaining a severe injury that worsened his mental condition. Hussein bounced between psychiatric wards for years, Qaraqa added, and was released from a hospital just two days before plowing into the crowded bus stop on Friday.
The West Bank has been on edge since Israel stepped up raids in the territory last spring, following a series of deadly Palestinian attacks inside Israel.
Nearly 150 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and east Jerusalem in 2022, making it the deadliest year in those territories since 2004, according to leading Israeli rights group B’Tselem. Last year, 30 people were killed in Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
The pace of death has quickened this year. So far, 45 Palestinians have been killed, according to a count by The Associated Press. Palestinians have killed 10 people on the Israeli side during that time.
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Associated Press writer Fares Akram in Hamilton, Ontario, contributed to this report.
Survivors still being found as quake death toll tops 28,000
Ibrahim Zakaria lost track of time drifting into and out of consciousness while trapped for nearly five days in the rubble of his home following the massive earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria this week.
The 23-year-old cellphone shop worker from the Syrian town of Jableh survived on dirty drips of water and eventually lost hope that he’d be saved.
“I said I am dead and it will be impossible for me to live again,” Zakaria, who was rescued Friday night, told The Associated Press on Saturday from his bed at a hospital in the coastal city of Latakia where his 60-year-old mother, Duha Nurallah, was also recovering.
Five days after two powerful earthquakes hours apart caused thousands of buildings to collapse, killing more than 28,000 people and leaving millions homeless, rescuers were still pulling unlikely survivors from the ruins — one of them just 7 months old.
Although each rescue elicited hugs and shouts of “Allahu akbar!” — “God is great!” — from the weary men and women working tirelessly in the freezing temperatures to save lives, they were the exception in a region blanketed by grief, desperation and mounting frustration.
More than a dozen survivors were rescued Saturday, including a family in Kahramanmaras, the Turkish city closest to the epicenter of Monday’s quake. Crews there helped 12-year-old Nehir Naz Narli to safety before going back for her parents.
In Gaziantep province, which borders Syria, a family of five was rescued from a demolished building in the city of Nurdagi, and a man and his 3-year-old daughter were pulled from debris in the town of Islahiye, television network HaberTurk reported. A 7-year-old girl was also rescued in Hatay province.
In Elbistan, a district in Kahramanmaras province, 20-year-old Melisa Ulku and another person were saved from the rubble 132 hours after the quake struck. Before she was brought to safety, police asked onlookers not to cheer or clap so as not to interfere with nearby rescue efforts.
Turkish TV station NTV reported that a 44-year-old man in Iskenderun, in Hatay province, was rescued 138 hours into his ordeal. Crying rescuers called it a miracle, with one saying they weren't expecting to find anyone alive but as they were digging, they saw his eyes and he said his name. In the same province, NTV also reported that a baby boy named Hamza was found alive in Antakya 140 hours after the quake. Some details of his rescue, including how he survived so long, weren't immediately clear.
Not every attempt ended happily. Zeynep Kahraman, who was brought out of the rubble after a spectacular rescue that took 50 hours, died at a hospital overnight. The ISAR German team who rescued her were shocked and saddened.
“It is important that the family could say goodbye, that they could see each other one more time, that they could hug each other again,” a member of the rescue team told German TV news channel n-tv.
The rescues came amid growing frustration over the Turkish government's response to the earthquake, which has killed 24,617 people and injured at least 80,000 people in Turkey alone.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan acknowledged earlier in the week that the initial response was hampered by the extensive damage to roads and other infrastructure that made it difficult to reach some points. He also said the worst-affected area was 500 kilometers (310 miles) in diameter and was home to 13.5 million people in Turkey.
That has meant rescue crews have had to pick and choose how and where to help.
During a tour of quake-damaged cities Saturday, Erdogan said a disaster of this scope was rare and again referred to it as the “disaster of the century.”
But the challenges facing aid efforts were of little comfort to those waiting for help.
In Antakya, the capital of Hatay province, scattered rescue crews were still hard at work but many residents had left by Saturday. Among those who stayed were people with family still buried. Many of them had been camping in the streets for days and sleeping in cars.
Acting on a tip, a rescue team from Hong Kong found three survivors under a building near the city's center on Saturday, said Gallant Wong, the group's spokesperson.
But Bulent Cifcifli, a local man, said he has been waiting for days for crews to pull his mother's body from her collapsed home. He said rescuers were working to retrieve her body at one point, but they were called to another location because they suspected there were survivors.
“Six days later, we don’t know how many are still under the rubble, and how many are dead or alive,” Cifcifli said, blaming a lack of heavy equipment.
Yazi al-Ali, a Syrian refugee who came to Antakya from Reyhanli, has been living in a tent as she waits for crews to find her mother, two sisters, including one who was pregnant, and their families. At one point, she stood over the rubble of the home in Antakya's old city center where she believes her pregnant sister was buried and, in a cracking voice, shouted her sister's name, “Rajha!”
“No one is answering to us, and no one comes to look,” she said. “They have stopped us from looking ourselves. I don’t know why.”
Even though experts say trapped people can live for a week or more, the odds of finding additional survivors are quickly waning. Rescuers were shifting to thermal cameras to help identify life amid the rubble, a sign that any remaining survivors could be too weak to call for help.
As aid continued to arrive Saturday, a 99-member group from the Indian Army’s medical assistance team began treating the injured in a temporary field hospital in the southern city of Iskenderun, where a main hospital was demolished.
One man, Sukru Canbulat, was wheeled into the hospital, his left leg badly injured with deep bruising, contusions and lacerations.
Wincing in pain, he said he was rescued from his collapsed apartment building in nearby Antakya within hours of the quake. But after receiving basic first aid, he was released without getting proper treatment.
“I buried (everyone that I lost), then I came here,” Canbulat said, counting his dead relatives. “My daughter is dead, my sibling died, my aunt and her daughter died, and the wife of her son” who was 8½ months pregnant.
A large makeshift graveyard was under construction in Antakya's outskirts on Saturday. Backhoes and bulldozers dug pits in the field as trucks and ambulances loaded with black body bags arrived continuously. Soldiers directing traffic on the busy adjacent road warned motorists not to take photos.
The hundreds of graves, spaced no more than 3 feet (a meter) apart, were marked with simple wooden planks set vertically in the ground.
A worker with Turkey’s Ministry of Religious Affairs who didn't wish to be identified because of orders not to share information with the media said that around 800 bodies were brought to the cemetery Friday, its first day of operation. By midday Saturday, he said, as many as 2,000 had been buried.
The disaster compounded suffering in a region beset by Syria’s 12-year civil war, which has displaced millions of people within the country and left them dependent on aid. The fighting sent millions more to seek refuge in Turkey.
The conflict has isolated many areas of Syria and complicated efforts to get aid in. The United Nations said the first earthquake-related aid convoy crossed from Turkey into northwestern Syria on Friday, the day after an aid shipment planned before the disaster arrived. The U.N. refugee agency estimated that as many as 5.3 million people have been left homeless in Syria alone.
The death toll in Syria’s northwestern rebel-held region has reached 2,166, according to the rescue worker group the White Helmets. The overall death toll in Syria stood at 3,553 on Saturday, though the 1,387 deaths reported for government-held parts of the country hadn’t been updated in days.
First war, now earthquake: Many Syrians displaced again
Living for years in a tent camp for displaced people in Syria’s rebel-held northwest, Ali Abu Yassin used to envy friends and relatives who had brick walls around them and solid ceilings over their heads.
The situation was turned on its head after Monday’s devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Turkey and Syria, killing more than 23,000 people, collapsing and damaging tens of thousands of buildings and potentially leaving millions displaced.
More than 20 of Abu Yassin’s relatives were killed when their apartment buildings collapsed from the quake in the nearby village of Bisnya, he said, including one cousin’s entire family of 14.
Abu Yassin made it to the village to help with rescue efforts.
“It took us two days to pull out their bodies and bury them in a mass grave,” Abu Yassin said by telephone from the rebel-held province of Idlib. From the tent he had once wished to leave, the father of three said, “I am so lucky. It’s God’s will.”
Before the earthquake, Syria’s 12-year-old uprising-turned-civil war had already displaced half the country’s pre-war population of 23 million. Abu Yassin was among them, fleeing from his home in another part of Idlib years ago.
Now the earthquake has caused a new wave of displacement.
Also Read: Earthquake stuns Syria's Aleppo even after war's horrors
The swath of destruction included the rebel-held enclave, centered on Idlib province, as well as heavily populated government-held cities like Aleppo, Hama and Latakia. The U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, said Friday that as many as 5.3 million people in Syria may have been left homeless.
For many, this is their second displacement.
Wassim Jaadan left his house in the rebel-held village of Zardana in Idlib, then under bombing by government forces, and fled to Lebanon with his family in 2013. Nine years later, after Lebanon collapsed into a protracted economic crisis and they could no longer afford rent, Jaadan brought his wife and four children home to Zardana.
“The economic situation was better than Lebanon, and we had our family, our parents here,” he said.
When the earthquake struck on Monday, the family was awoken by a light shaking that quickly became more violent. They escaped before the building fell and crumbled to rubble.
The family now lives in a tent, which is nearly empty since all their possessions were destroyed. “We are about to die from the cold,” Jaadan said. “I am unable to think because of the shock.”
UNHCR said in a statement that it is trying to ensure that shelters housing displaced people have adequate facilities, as well as tents, plastic sheeting, thermal blankets, sleeping mats and winter clothing.
However, aid has been slow to reach many areas. The first earthquake-related aid convoy of 14 trucks crossed through Turkey into northwestern Syria on Friday, a U.N. spokesperson told The Associated Press. The road to the Bab al-Hawa border crossing was obstructed for days following the earthquake due to road damage and debris from collapsed buildings.
In the rural areas of northwest Syria, there are “tens of thousands of displaced people staying under olive trees in freezing temperatures,” Raed Saleh, head of the opposition’s Syrian Civil Defense, also known as White Helmets, said during a news conference Friday. Saleh said 500 buildings in northwest Syria have been completely destroyed, 1,400 partially crumbled and tens of thousands of homes were damaged.
In other earthquake-damaged areas, displaced people crowded into temporary shelters in churches and mosques, schools, hotels and gyms.
On Friday, in his first visit to areas hit by the earthquake, President Bashar Assad and his wife Asma visited two shelters in the northern city of Aleppo and a kitchen preparing 3,000 meals a day for displaced people.
In the coastal city of Latakia, a base of support for Assad, some 2,000 people on Friday evening crammed into the city’s sports center.
Under a banner with Assad’s face and a Syrian flag, the floor of the center’s basketball court was crowded with mattresses and sleeping bags. Families huddled in winter jackets to stay warm and ate hot meals provided by a local aid organization.
Wardah al-Hussein, a 67-year-old mother of nine, said she has been sleeping in the stadium since the earthquake. Originally from Aleppo, she was now starting her second displacement.
“We fled from our city and our house was destroyed, and we came here,” she said. “Now because of the earthquake we went through it all again.”
Those whose homes were spared have opened them to relatives and neighbors.
A resident of the rebel-held northwestern town of Atmeh, Mustafa Ali, said that already two families of relatives moved in with his family in his three-room apartment while they wait to see if experts will make sure their own homes are suitable for living.
“What people urgently need now is tents” as well as warm clothes and baby formula, Ali said.
An aid worker based in northern Syria, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said eight sprawling facilities, including a center where coronavirus patients were once kept, have been opened to host the displaced in the region.
Adding to the troubles of the displaced, he said, food prices are going up in the wake of the earthquake due to limited supplies.
“Our conditions are miserable,” he said. “I need aid now.”
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Associated Press reporter Abdelrahman Shaheen in Latakia, Syria, contributed to this report.
Rescues in Turkey offer moments of relief in quake aftermath
Rescuers pulled several people alive from the shattered remnants of buildings on Friday, some who survived more than 100 hours trapped under crushed concrete in the bitter cold after a catastrophic earthquake slammed Turkey and Syria, killing more than 22,000.
The survivors included six relatives who huddled in a small pocket under the rubble, a teenager who drank his own urine to slake his thirst, and a 4-year-old boy offered a jelly bean to calm him down as he was shimmied out.
But the flurry of dramatic rescues — some broadcast live on Turkish television — could not obscure the overwhelming devastation of what Turkey’s president called one of the greatest disasters in his nation’s history. Entire neighborhoods of high-rise buildings have been reduced to twisted metal, pulverized concrete and exposed wires, and the magnitude 7.8 quake has already killed more people than Japan’s Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, with many more bodies undoubtedly yet to be recovered and counted.
Four days after the earthquake hammered a sprawling border region that is home to more than 13.5 million people, relatives wept and chanted as rescuers pulled 17-year-old Adnan Muhammed Korkut from a basement in Turkey’s Gaziantep, near the quake’s epicenter. He had been trapped there for 94 hours, forced to drink his own urine to survive.
“Thank God you arrived,” he said, embracing his mother and others who leaned down to kiss and hug him as he was being loaded into an ambulance.
For one of the rescuers, identified only as Yasemin, Adnan’s survival hit home hard.
“I have a son just like you,” she told him after giving him a warm hug. “I swear to you, I have not slept for four days. ... I was trying to get you out.”
In Adiyaman, meanwhile, rescue crews pulled 4-year-old Yagiz Komsu from the debris of his home, 105 hours after the quake struck. They later managed to rescue his mother, Ayfer Komsu, who survived with a fractured rib, according the HaberTurk television, which broadcast the rescue live. The crowd was asked not to cheer or applaud to avoid scaring the child, who was given a jelly bean, the station reported.
Elsewhere, HaberTurk television said rescuers had identified nine people trapped inside the remains of a high-rise apartment block in Iskenderun and pulled out six of them, including a woman who waved at onlookers as she was being carried away on a stretcher. The crowd shouted: “God is Great!” after she was brought out.
The building was only 600 feet (200 meters) from the Mediterranean Sea and narrowly avoided being flooded when the massive earthquake sent water surging into the city center.
There were still more stories: A married couple was pulled from the rubble in Iskenderun after spending 109 hours buried in a small crevice. A German team said it worked for more than 50 hours to free a woman from the rubble of a house in Kirikhan. In the hard-hit city of Kahramanmaras, two teenage sisters were saved, and video of the operation showed one emergency worker playing a pop song on his smartphone to distract them.
And the work continued: One trapped woman could be heard speaking to a team trying to dig her out in video broadcast by HaberTurk television. She told her would-be rescuers that she had given up hope of being found — and prayed to be put to sleep because she was so cold. The station did not say where the operation was taking place.
Even though experts say trapped people can live for a week or more, the chances of finding survivors are dimming.
The rescues Friday provided fleeting moments of joy and relief amid the misery and hardship gripping the shattered region where morgues and cemeteries are overwhelmed and bodies lie wrapped in blankets, rugs and tarps in the streets of some cities.
In Kahramanmaras, a sports hall served as a makeshift morgue to accommodate and identify bodies.
Temperatures remain below freezing across the large region, and many people have no place to shelter. The Turkish government has distributed millions of hot meals, as well as tents and blankets, but was still struggling to reach many people in need.
Some in Turkey have complained that the government was slow to respond, a perception that could hurt Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as he faces a tough battle for reelection in May.
The disaster compounded suffering in a region beset by Syria’s 12-year civil war, which has displaced millions of people within the country and left them dependent on aid and sent millions more seeking refuge in Turkey.
The ongoing conflict has isolated many areas of Syria and complicated efforts to get aid in. The U.N. said the first earthquake-related aid convoy crossed from Turkey into northwestern Syria on Friday — a day after an aid shipment planned before the disaster arrived.
The trucks managed to navigate a route that had been obstructed for days by debris.
Syrian President Bashar Assad and his wife, Asmaa, visited survivors at the Aleppo University Hospital, Syrian state media reported — the leader’s first public appearance in an affected area of the country since the disaster. He then visited rescuers in one of the hardest-hit areas in the city.
Aleppo has been scarred by years of heavy bombardment and shelling — much of it by the forces of Assad and his ally, Russia — and it was among the cities most devastated by the earthquake.
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Dr. Michael Ryan, WHO’s head of emergencies, were expected to arrive in the city later Friday to help support the delivery of assistance.
Also Friday, the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has been waging a separatist insurgency in Turkey’s mainly-Kurdish southeast, including some of the affected areas, said it was declaring a cease-fire.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s conflict with Kurdish militants in Syria, linked to the PKK, has further complicated the delivery of aid to the region. On Thursday, Kurdish officials in Syria said that Turkish-backed Syrian rebels had blocked an aid convoy destined for earthquake victims.
Turkey’s disaster management agency said more than 19,300 people had been confirmed killed in the disaster so far in Turkey, with more than 77,000 injured.
More than 3,300 have been confirmed killed in Syria, bringing the total number of dead to more than 22,000.
Some 12,000 buildings in Turkey have either collapsed or sustained serious damage, according to Turkey’s minister of environment and urban planning, Murat Kurum.
Engineers suggested that the scale of the devastation is partly explained by lax enforcement of building codes, which some have warned for years would make them vulnerable to earthquakes.
Mustafa Turan counted 248 collapsed buildings between the airport and the center of Adiyaman after he rushed to his hometown from Istanbul following the quake.
The journalist said Friday that 15 of his relatives had been killed, and scores of people were sleeping outside or in tents.
“At night, about 4 a.m., it got so cold that our drinking water froze,” he said.