“He Never Left The Hand Of His Daughter Who Died In The Earthquake”

As men clamber over the ruins of the pancaked building, now shaped like a pyramid of rubble, one man sits still. Wearing an orange coat to protect himself from the winter freeze, Mesut Hançer perches on concrete slabs and twisted rebar - all that remains of the apartment block in Kahramanmaras, a Turkish city close to the epicenter of Monday’s earthquake . His face is still - his expression, blank. He is grief-stricken but resolute: He won’t let go of his daughter’s hand. Irmak, 15, was killed when the building collapsed. The girl’s body is sandwiched between a mattress, dirt, and the colossal weight of the upper floors of the building. All that peeks out is a lifeless, pale hand that her father steadfastly grips. “He never left the hand of his daughter who died in the earthquake,” wrote Adem Atlan, the photographer with Agence France-Presse who took the pictures of the grieving father on Tuesday, in an Instagram story uploaded Wednesday. "Unbelievable pain," he later wrote . Altan’s photos went viral online and were printed on newspaper front pages around the world on Wednesday from Turkey to Spain to the UK to the US. “With the courage of despair,” read the headline accompanying the photo in Belgium's De Standaard newspaper . “A glimpse of pain and desperation among the ruins,” Brazil’s O Globo paper wrote in its headline for the picture. A 2015 photo of Mesut and Irmak uploaded by the girl to Facebook shows the father and daughter smiling as they pose by a small water fountain. Almost eight years later, a different photo of the pair has been seen across the globe and become a defining image of tragedy. 🗞 Sánchez: “La ‘ley del sí es sí’ tuvo efectos indeseados... y me quedo corto”; No hay casa a la que volver para los supervivientes del terremoto, en la #Portada de EL PAÍS este miércoles 8 de febrero 🔗 https://t.co/HSZcbmeK7i Twitter: @el_pais Just published: front page of the Financial Times, UK edition, Wednesday 8 February https://t.co/W6nHpRZNfP Twitter: @FinancialTimes Olá, bom dia. Esta é capa do #JornalOGlobo desta quarta-feira, 8 de fevereiro de 2022. Para ler as notícias, acompanhe nossas redes sociais, ou acesse: https://t.co/6QeHHAyTfp. Twitter: @JornalOGlobo Take an early look at the front page of The Wall Street Journal https://t.co/UX88fXbRBy Twitter: @WSJ Irmak is just one of a horrifyingly large number of people killed by Monday’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake, which has devastated large swaths of Turkey and neighboring Syria. More than 20,000 people are known to have died, according to tallies from the Associated Press on Thursday , making the disaster one of the deadliest of the last decade. There are few more traumatized corners of the globe that the quake could have struck than Syria’s northwest. That country, plagued for more than a decade by a civil war that has wrought devastation and triggered a global refugee crisis, already had 15 million people in need of humanitarian aid even before the tremor began, according to David Miliband,...

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