It was around 11 p.m. on Feb. 5 in Calgary when Mohammad Ajmal Nikzad heard the news on TV about the devastating earthquake that hit Kahramanmaras, Turkiye, where his mother and three siblings were living.
“I tried to call them. I called every one of them, but their phones were off,” he said on Tuesday. “I realized that something had happened to them and soon I booked a ticket and came to Turkiye.”
Nikzad’s mother, along with his brother and sisters, were living in a seven-storey building when the deadly 7.8 magnitude earthquake jolted wide swaths of Turkey and Syria. The entire structure collapsed.
“My family is under the building. Of four family members, two of were taken to hospital and two of them – my mother and my sister – are under dust … Please pray for them to be alive,” Nikzad said in a video he posted to TikTok on Feb. 7.
“When I arrived there, I saw the doomsday. I saw bodies with no legs, no heads,” he added.
After hours of searching, Nikzad said he found the dead bodies of his 23-year-old sister Sayeda Hashimi and his mother Najya among those pulled from the rubble by rescue teams.
He tried to find an ambulance or a vehicle to take the bodies somewhere to be buried.
“I was on the street for six hours with my sister’s body in a bag, but no one was helping me. I desperately was asking every driver to stop and help me,” Nikzad said.
Finally, a group of people answered his calls for help. After burying his mother and sister, he started searching for his 20-year-old sister Najma Hashimi and 25-year-old brother Sharif Hashimi.