Canadian man who lost mother and sister in Turkiye earthquake struggles to help surviving siblings

Mohammad Ajmal 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 last week.

GRAPHIC WARNING: This story contains disturbing details

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 told CTVNews.ca 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.