‘Get me out of here’: how two Syrian siblings survived trapped under rubble for two days

Omar Rahal heard a voice coming from the rubble, so faint that he struggled to understand if it might only be in his head. The previous night, two earthquakes of magnitude 7.8 and 7.6 had levelled his village, Harem, in the rebel-held province of Idlib in Syria, flattening dozens of buildings including the block of flats where his cousin Mahmoud lived with his wife and their seven children.

A few hours later, Rahal, the local police chief, rushed into the rubble of the house in the hope of finding Mahmoud and his family alive. All morning he heard no signs of life, but at 12.30pm his ears picked up five words spoken by what sounded like a little girl: “Get me out of here.”

A few metres below the top of the pile of debris, wedged between concrete, lay Mahmoud’s five-year-old daughter Jinan, together with her nine-month-old brother Abdullah, who she was comforting under the rubble. Next to them, buried by the remains of her house, was the body of their mother, Suaad. Rahal could see only her arm, with which she seemed to have tried to embrace her children to protect them.

Rahal tried to free them but realised he could not do it alone. So he filmed the two trapped children and sent the footage to his police colleagues, asking them to intervene. The video quickly bounced from one phone to another, leaving the borders of Syria and going viral, totalling about 5m hours of viewing on Twitter alone and becoming a symbol of the tragedy in Idlib.

Omar Rahal with his cousin’s daughter Jinan at a makeshift hospital. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

“My men arrived immediately and helped me extract little Abdullah, who fortunately had only a few small scratches,” Rahal told the Guardian. “But the problem was Jinan. She was pinned by a concrete slab and had an iron rod impaled through her leg.”

Rescue efforts in Idlib, which remained largely closed off from the outside world for two days after the quake, were slowed by a lack of machinery and assistance, with people forced to extract loved ones with their bare hands.

“To lift the concrete block that was obstructing it, we used a jack, the one for lifting cars when you need to change a tyre,” Rahal said. “It worked. But Jinan still had a that iron rod stuck in her leg. It had to be cut.”

Rescuers tried to cut the rod with a thick steel blade as Jinan wept in pain. To make matters more complicated, aftershocks shook the village again. What little remained standing of the buildings began to collapse.

“Please! Get me out of here,” Jinan begged the men.

There was no time to lose. “We had no choice,” Rahal said. “We risked dying and losing the child too. We therefore decided to do what we never wanted – extract Jinan while her leg was still partially impaled on the rod.”

At about 2am on Tuesday, after nearly 22 hours under the rubble, a screaming Jinan was pulled free.

Five-year-old Jinan in her hospital bed. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

A week after the rescue, the Guardian visited Jinan and her little brother in a hospital converted from a former school where the injured children of Harem were receiving treatment. Abdullah slept wrapped in a woollen blanket while Jinan lay, still in pain, on a bed.

“The wound to her leg is very serious,” said her doctor, Wajih al-Karrat. “Jinan may never walk again as she did before. I won’t lie to you. If the wound doesn’t improve, we could be forced to amputate her leg.”

After the release of the video, some media outlets erroneously reported that Jinan’s father was still alive. Sadly, that is not the case. “Jinan and Abullah are the only ones left alive in the family,” Rahal said in tears. The two children have been entrusted to their great-uncle and his wife.

Jinan and her brother are among an untold number of children orphaned by the earthquake in Idlib. The death toll from the earthquake in Syria has climbed above 3,580, as UN aid officials call for more aid access to the rebel-controlled north-west of the country.

“It’s a tragedy,” said Karrat in a low voice. “Jinan knows she has been left alone with her brother. But you see these children here, next to Jinan’s bed, are orphans too. And the majority still wonder where their parents are and when they will come to meet them. First, we want to treat them well. Then, at some point, we will be forced to tell them they, too, have been orphaned.”