Malek Ibrahim made it out of his home after the earthquake hit Syria and thought he could breathe a sigh of relief. But 30 relatives were still unaccounted for elsewhere.
For the past two days, Ibrahim has been doggedly tearing at the rubble with his hands as he searches for family members who were buried when Monday's deadly earthquake struck both Syria and Turkey.
"Every time we recover a body, I remember the beautiful times that we spent together," he said, weeping as he used a pickaxe to remove yet more wreckage."We used to have fun and joke around, but never again... I will never see them again."When the 7.8-magnitude quake hit at dawn on Monday, Ibrahim, his wife and eight children fled their home in Idlib, in the rebel-held northwest.
Ibrahim's family stayed outside in the street for hours in the pouring rain, as dozens of buildings crumpled to the ground. "It's a feeling I can't describe, a tragedy," he said, "We are a doomed people in every sense of the word."Dozens of residents, fighters and rescuers gathered on top of the ruins, digging through the rubble and calling out to any survivors underneath -- in the hope that someone will respond.
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