A young Syrian boy smiled and started to play with rescue workers who pulled him from the rubble of a building that was destroyed following deadly earthquakes. A man cries uncontrollably as he holds the body of his grandson after losing nearly 25 relatives in the catastrophic quakes. A young girl pleads with the rescuers to get her and her little brother from underneath the rubble. A pregnant mother who was trapped under a collapsed building gave birth to her child under the rubble but died before rescue workers could reach her...these and many more tell the stories of grief-stricken destructions that have brought Turkey and Syria down to dust and wreckage.
Rescue workers continue to pull living people from the damaged buildings but hope has started to fade amid freezing temperatures more than three full days since the quake hit on Monday.
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The death toll from the catastrophic earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria rose to more than 15,000 as more bodies were pulled from the rubble of collapsed homes in the stricken zone, Turkey's disaster management agency said Thursday. The agency said 12,391 people had been confirmed killed in Turkey after the earthquake and series of aftershocks, which brought down thousands of buildings in southeastern Turkey. On the other side of the border in Syria, another 2,902 people have been reported to have been killed.
Experts said the survival window for those trapped under the rubble or otherwise unable to obtain basic necessities was closing rapidly. And live evidence of the same is all the visuals that are surfacing on social media. While they say it's too soon to abandon hope, we look at a series of moments from the rubble-hit grounds of Syria and Turkey...
