ISKENDERUN, Turkey : Every day, six relatives congregated in a tiny air pocket. A thirsty teenager who was in desperate need drank his own urine. A popular song helped two terrified sisters feel better as they waited for rescuers to set them free.

These earthquake survivors were among the more than a dozen people who were found alive in the rubble on Friday after being stranded in the darkness for more than four days due to the disaster that struck Turkey and Syria.

In the midst of a catastrophe that has claimed the lives of nearly 24,000 people, injured at least 80,000 others, and left millions homeless, the improbable rescues, which came so long after Monday's 7.8-magnitude earthquake brought down thousands of buildings, offered fleeting moments of joy.

A crowd cheered "God is great!" as Haci Murat Kilinc and his wife, Raziye, were transported on stretchers to an ambulance in the Mediterranean city of Iskenderun. After removing a man from his collapsed home two hours earlier in Kahramanmaras, the city closest to the epicentre, rescuers hugged and chanted their thanks to God.

Rescuers and onlookers in Adiyaman, a severely damaged city of more than a quarter million people, held back their excitement as 4-year-old Yagiz Komsu emerged from the rubble, according to Haber Turk television, which broadcast the rescue live.

Later, teams managed to save his mother, Ayfer Komsu, 27, who had suffered a broken rib. The flurry of dramatic rescues, however, could not hide the devastation spanning a vast border region with more than 13.5 million residents.

The earthquake has already claimed more lives than Japan's Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, and many more bodies have yet to be found and identified. Entire neighbourhoods of high-rise buildings have been reduced to rubble.

Adnan Korkut, 17, was rescued from a basement in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, which is close to the earthquake's epicentre, as cheering family members watched in tears. He embraced his mother and others who knelt down to kiss and hug him as he was being loaded into an ambulance, saying, "Thank God you arrived.

Adnan's survival was especially poignant for one of the rescuers, Yasemin, who has not been named. She gave him a warm hug and said, "I have a son just like you." I haven't slept for four days, I swear to you. I was attempting to remove you.

Moreover, HaberTurk television reported that six of the nine people who were trapped inside the wreckage of an Iskenderun high-rise apartment building had been freed by rescuers, including a woman who waved to onlookers as she was being carried away on a stretcher. The moment she was brought out, the crowd yelled, "God is great!"The building was only 600 feet (200 meters) from the Mediterranean Sea and narrowly avoided being flooded when the massive earthquake sent water surging into the city centre.

In a video of a different rescue operation in Kahramanmaras, a rescuer can be seen playing a pop song on his smartphone to keep the two teenage sisters distracted while they wait to be released. There were still additional reports: To rescue a woman from a collapsed house in Kirikhan, a German team claimed to have spent more than 50 hours at the scene. And in a video that HaberTurk television broadcast, a trapped woman could be heard speaking to a team that was attempting to free her. Even though experts claim that people who are trapped can survive for up to a week, the likelihood of finding more survivors was rapidly decreasing.

The UNHCR's Sivanka Dhanapala told reporters on Friday that the organization is concentrating on providing tents, plastic sheeting, thermal blankets, sleeping mats, and winter clothing. According to Syrian state media, survivors at the Aleppo University Hospital were visited by Syrian President Bashar Assad and his wife, Asmaa. He next paid a visit to the city's worst-hit rescue workers.

Aleppo was among the cities most severely affected by the earthquake and has been scarred by years of intense bombardment and shelling, much of it by the forces of Assad and his ally, Russia.

The Syrian government also declared that it would permit aid to enter all regions of the nation, including those in the northwest controlled by armed opposition groups.

The PKK, a banned organization, also declared a cease-fire in its separatist insurgency in Turkey's primarily Kurdish southeast, including some of the earthquake-affected regions, on Friday. Engineers suggested that the scale of the devastation was partly explained by lax enforcement of building codes.

More than 20,200 confirmed fatalities and more than 80,000 injuries have been reported by Turkey's disaster management agency.

The number of confirmed deaths in Syria has surpassed 3,500, bringing the total to almost 20,000.
Some 12,000 buildings in Turkey have either collapsed or sustained serious damage, according to Turkey’s minister of environment and urban planning, Murat Kurum. Turkey’s vice president, Fuat Oktay, said more than 1 million people were being housed in temporary shelters.