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Rescued baby in Syria
Photo: Ghaith Alsayed/AP
She's alive - that's a miracle.
And yet the start of her life is so cruel that there are no words for it: In the earthquake region in northwestern Syria, a baby was rescued from the rubble of a house that was still connected by the umbilical cord to its mother, who died in the disaster.
The newborn girl is the sole survivor of her family.
The father, the three sisters, the brother and the aunt could only be rescued dead from the rubble.
The family's four-storey house in the village of Janairis in the Afrin region collapsed due to the strong earthquake on Monday.
Relatives then searched for the buried family.
"Then we heard a noise and we dug," one of them told AFP.
"We cleared debris and found this little one, praise God."
A video circulated online of a man holding up a naked, dust-covered baby with the remains of his umbilical cord still hanging from his belly amidst the rubble.
In the face of freezing temperatures, someone brings a blanket to wrap the newborn in.
The baby was taken to a hospital in the nearby town of Afrin.
There the little one was placed in an incubator and given infusions of vitamins.
"She was brought in with limbs stiff from the cold and her blood pressure had dropped," her doctor told AFP.
"We did first aid and gave her IVs because she hadn't had milk for a long time."
The baby suffered bruises, but the condition of the 3175 gram newborn is stable, the doctor said.
According to his estimation, the baby was born about seven hours after the earthquake.
It took hours to rescue the other family members.
Their bodies were lined up in front of a neighboring house and covered with cloths of different colors.
dop/AFP
