Turkey-Syria earthquake: Boy, nine, pulled out alive after five days underground in arms of his mother
In the wasteland that scars the centre of Kahramanmaras in Turkey, we watched a pair of rescuers perched in a digger’s scoop as they investigated a great pile of concrete.
Their mobile bucket took them up into the sky as they probed a toppled building. No one had checked this spot before.
It is not surprising however.
In Kahramanmaras, more than 200 buildings have been destroyed by the earthquakes and tremors.
“Is anyone in there? If you can hear me tap on the wall,” said a rescuer.
“No, no one.”
Local officials face a difficult dilemma. Tens of thousands have been displaced by the disaster with many now sleeping in plastic tents or self-constructed dwellings on the roadside.
Security ‘rapidly deteriorating’ in Turkey as death tolls passes 28,000 – earthquake latest
The climate is harsh, particularly at night, and the authorities need to clear the rubble and begin the process of rebuilding.
But there is a conflicting demand – a moral obligation to search for survivors – and this is a necessarily skilled and time-consuming process.
At what used to be the Elbrar apartment block, we met a multi-national rescue team trying to release a woman called Leyla from deep beneath the pile.
And they’d been working all night to release her.
A multi-national rescue team was involved in the search for Leyla. Pic: AP
We spoke to an Italian rescuer called Gianluca Pesce, an engineer who was volunteering on the site.
“We’ve opened one corridor inside, a corridor (that is) like 50cm square, very small, just enough for one person. I went inside, through the tunnel for about seven metres. We start to call to her, she answered but her voice is weak.”
The rescuers, led by members of Israel’s national search and rescue unit, had spent 24 hours trying to reach her from the side and the top of the building. They had already managed to free the woman’s husband and daughter but Leyla was in a particularly difficult position.
“It’s going to take a long time,” said Mr Pesce.
Sometimes, a rescue is conducted in a matter of few minutes.
While we filmed at the Elbrar building, word spread about another emergency. Just 100 metres from where we were standing, a survivor had been located beneath the remains of an 11-storey block.
More than 200 buildings have been destroyed in Kahramanmaras
An excavator driver called Selmir Gizet told us he had been clearing the pile when he heard a strange sound from the rubble. He decided to raise the alarm.
Shortly afterwards, a man called Gohkan was dragged out of a hole and placed on a stretcher.
Gohkan was pulled out of a hole by rescuers
His feet were blistered and frost-bitten and his face was lacerated – we saw a large indentation on his forehead.
But he was alive, managing to survive more than four days underground.
“God is great” shouted the crowd, “God is great”.
With tears flowing down his cheeks, one rescuer told us: “I had a dream that I would find a man. We worked together as a team and put all efforts into rescuing him. God save him, I hope he survives.”
Back at the Elbrar block, the search and rescuers were looking for Leyla but they told us there had been an important development.
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The search for survivors in the rubble goes on
Leyla’s voice may have belonged to her son – the pair were lying together in the boy’s room when the earthquake struck.
“We were looking for a woman, we know there are a woman and child inside and when we came closer, it became apparent that we were talking to the child,” said search and rescue paramedic, Jonathan Rousso.
“The team have got to the point where they are on the other side of the wall, but they can’t cut (the wall), and there is a washing machine (in the way). You can’t cut through the washing machine. You have to find a way, so we are digging deeper.”
The operation was dangerous, and with frequent tremors their tunnels were at risk of collapse. We saw team members dash into the remains of a local shop, looking for timber and screws to prop up their underground channels.
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Over the course of an agonising evening, rescue team members managed to reach the boy.
He told them his name was Ridvan, Leyla’s nine-year-old son.
A doctor tried to stabilise him down below but there were serious concerns about his condition. The decision was made to get him out.
Ridvan, Leyla’s nine-year-old son, was saved and taken into an ambulance
On the surface, the volunteers called for quiet, for fear of alarming the boy, and Ridvan was carried on a stretcher through a concrete hole. He was greeted to the sound of whispers from the crowd that had grown to several hundred.
He had spent nearly five days underground, in the arms of his mother. He was cold and badly dehydrated and part of his body had been crushed. The paramedics sped him to hospital.
Ridvan pictured in hospital
Unfortunately, his mother Leyla did not survive, the rescue team unable to rescue her in time.
A national catastrophe and a family’s tragedy in a city marked by sorrow.
The Donald Trump peace plan is nothing of the sort. It takes Russian demands and presents them as peace proposals, in what is effectively for Ukraine a surrender ultimatum.
If accepted, it would reward armed aggression. The principle, sacrosanct since the Second World War, for obvious and very good reasons, that even de facto borders cannot be changed by force, will have been trampled on at the behest of the leader of the free world.
The Kremlin will have imposed terms via negotiators on a country it has violated, and whose people its troops have butchered, massacred and raped. It is without doubt the biggest crisis in Trans-Atlantic relations since the war began, if not since the inception of NATO.
The question now is: are Europe’s leaders up to meeting the daunting challenges that will follow. On past form, we cannot be sure.
Vladimir Putin, President of Russia. Pic: Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov via Reuters
The plan proposes the following:
• Land seized by Vladimir Putin’s unwarranted and unprovoked invasion would be ceded by Kyiv.
• Territory his forces have fought but failed to take with colossal loss of life will be thrown into the bargain for good measure.
• Ukraine will be barred from NATO, from having long-range weapons, from hosting foreign troops, from allowing foreign diplomatic planes to land, and its military neutered, reduced in size by more than half.
Donald Trump meeting Vladimir Putin in Alaska in August, File pic: Reuters
And most worryingly for Western leaders, the plan proposes NATO and Russia negotiate with America acting as mediator.
Lest we forget, America is meant to be the strongest partner in NATO, not an outside arbitrator. In one clause, Mr Trump’s lack of commitment to the Western alliance is laid bare in chilling clarity.
And even for all that, the plan will not bring peace. Mr Putin has made it abundantly clear he wants all of Ukraine.
He has a proven track record of retiring, rallying his forces, then returning for more. Reward a bully as they say, and he will only come back for more. Why wouldn’t he, if he is handed the fortress cities of Donetsk and a clear run over open tank country to Kyiv in a few years?
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US draft Russia peace plan
Since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, Europe has tried to keep the maverick president onside when his true sympathies have repeatedly reverted to Moscow.
It has been a demeaning and sycophantic spectacle, NATO’s secretary general stooping even to calling the US president ‘Daddy’. And it hasn’t worked. It may have made matters worse.
A choir sing in front of an apartment building destroyed in a Russian missile strike in Ternopil, Ukraine. Pic: Reuters
The parade of world leaders trooping through Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, lavishing praise on his Gaza ceasefire plan, only encouraged him to believe he is capable of solving the world’s most complex conflicts with the minimum of effort.
The Gaza plan is mired in deepening difficulty, and it never came near addressing the underlying causes of the war.
Read more:
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Trump’s 28-point Ukraine peace plan in full
Most importantly, principles the West has held inviolable for eight decades cannot be torn up for the sake of a quick and uncertain peace.
With a partner as unreliable, the challenge to Europe cannot be clearer.
In the words of one former Baltic foreign minister: “There is a glaringly obvious message for Europe in the 28-point plan: This is the end of the end.
“We have been told repeatedly and unambiguously that Ukraine’s security, and therefore Europe’s security, will be Europe’s responsibility. And now it is. Entirely.”
If Europe does not step up to the plate and guarantee Ukraine’s security in the face of this American betrayal, we could all pay the consequences.
World
Ukraine and Europe cannot reject Trump’s plan – they will play for time and hope he can still be persuaded to desert the Kremlin
“Terrible”, “weird”, “peculiar” and “baffling” – some of the adjectives being levelled by observers at the Donald Trump administration’s peace plan for Ukraine.
The 28-point proposal was cooked up between Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff and Kremlin official Kirill Dmitriev without European and Ukrainian involvement.
It effectively dresses up Russian demands as a peace proposal. Demands first made by Russia at the high watermark of its invasion in 2022, before defeats forced it to retreat from much of Ukraine.
Ukraine war latest: Kyiv receives US peace plan
(l-r) Kirill Dmitriev and special envoy Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg in April 2025. Pic: Kremlin Pool Photo/AP
Its proposals are non-starters for Ukrainians.
It would hand over the rest of Donbas, territory they have spent almost four years and lost tens of thousands of men defending.
Analysts estimate at the current rate of advance, it would take Russia four more years to take the land it is proposing simply to give them instead.
It proposes more than halving the size of the Ukrainian military and depriving them of some of their most effective long-range weapons.
And it would bar any foreign forces acting as peacekeepers in Ukraine after any peace deal is done.
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Is Moscow back in Washington’s good books?
The plan comes at an excruciating time for the Ukrainians.
They are being pounded with devastating drone attacks, killing dozens in the last few nights alone.
They are on the verge of losing a key stronghold city, Pokrovsk.
And Volodymyr Zelenskyy is embroiled in the gravest political crisis since the war began, with key officials facing damaging corruption allegations.
Read more from Sky News:
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Ukrainian support for peace plan ‘very much in doubt’
The suspicion is Mr Witkoff and Mr Dmitriev conspired together to choose this moment to put even more pressure on the Ukrainian president.
Perversely, though, it may help him.
There has been universal condemnation and outrage in Kyiv at the Witkoff-Dmitriev plan. Rivals have little choice but to rally around the wartime Ukrainian leader as he faces such unreasonable demands.
The genesis of this plan is unclear.
Was it born from Donald Trump’s overinflated belief in his peacemaking abilities? His overrated Gaza ceasefire plan attracted lavish praise from world leaders, but now seems mired in deepening difficulty.
The fear is Mr Trump’s team are finding ways to allow him to walk away from this conflict altogether, blaming Ukrainian intransigence for the failure of his diplomacy.
Mr Trump has already ended financial support for Ukraine, acting as an arms dealer instead, selling weapons to Europe to pass on to the invaded democracy.
If he were to take away military intelligence support too, Ukraine would be blind to the kind of attacks that in recent days have killed scores of civilians.
Europe and Ukraine cannot reject the plan entirely and risk alienating Mr Trump.
They will play for time and hope against all the evidence he can still be persuaded to desert the Kremlin and put pressure on Vladimir Putin to end the war, rather than force Ukraine to surrender instead.
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