AFRIN, Syria — A Syrian baby girl whose mother gave birth to her and then passed away while trapped under the rubble of their home during Monday's devastating earthquakes now has a name: Aya, which in Arabic can mean "miracle" or "a sign from God." With her parents and all her siblings killed, her great-uncle will take her in.
Aya is one of untold numbers of orphans left by this week's massive earthquakes and aftershocks that killed more than 20,000 people in northern Syria and southeast Turkey. The first 7.8 pre-dawn quake on Monday brought down thousands of apartment buildings on residents as they were roused from sleep, so entire families often perished.
In most cases, relatives take in orphaned children, doctors and experts say. But those surviving relatives are also dealing with the wreckage of their own lives and families. In the continued chaos days after the quake, with the dead and a dwindling number of survivors still being found, doctors say it's impossible to say how many children lost their parents.
At one hospital in northwest Syria, a red-haired 7-year-old girl, Jana al-Abdo, asked repeatedly where her parents were after she was brought in, said Dr. Khalil Alsfouk, who was treating her. "We later found out she was the only one who survived among her entire family," he said.
In the case of newborn Aya, her father's uncle, Salah al-Badran, will take her in once she is released from the hospital. But al-Badran's own house was among those destroyed in the northwest Syrian town of Jenderis. He and his family managed to escape from the one-story building, but now he and the other 11 members of his household are living in a tent, he told The Associated Press.
"After the earthquake, there's no one able to live in his house or building. Only 10% of the buildings here are safe to live in and the rest are unlivable," he said, communicating via voice messages.
Rescue workers in Jenderis discovered Aya on Monday afternoon, more than 10 hours after the quake hit, as they were digging through the wreckage of the five-story apartment building where she'd lived with her parents.
Buried under concrete, the baby still was connected by her umbilical cord to her mother, Afraa Abu Hadiya, who had died along with her husband and four other children. The baby was rushed to a hospital in the nearby town of Afrin.
Syria, which already has a refugee crisis after 12 years of brutal civil war, is facing particular difficulty. The area worst affected by the earthquake is split between government-held territory, controlled by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and opposition-held territory, which borders Turkey and is surrounded by government forces. This has made delivery of aid to hard-hit regions there slow and difficult.