A powerful 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck wide swaths of Turkey and Syria on Monday, killing more than 2,600 people and injuring thousands more as it toppled hundreds of buildings and left residents trapped under rubble.
Authorities feared the death toll would continue to rise as rescuers searched for survivors amid piles of twisted metal and concrete blocks in a region ravaged by more than a decade of civil war in Syria and a refugee crisis.

People woke with a start several hours before dawn and rushed into the street in the rain and snow to escape falling debris, while those who were trapped cried out for help. Throughout the day, strong aftershocks shook the region, including a jolt almost as strong as the initial quake. As night fell, workers were still cutting blocks and pulling out bodies as desperate families waited for news of their trapped loved ones.

“My grandson is one and a half years old. Please help them, please. We can’t hear them nor have we heard from them since this morning. Please, they were on the 12th floor,” cried Imran Bahur next to his collapsed apartment building in the Turkish city of Adana. His daughter and family were still missing.

Tens of thousands of people left homeless in Turkey and Syria faced a cold night. In Gaziantep, a Turkish provincial capital about 33 kilometers (20 miles) from the epicenter, people took shelter in shopping malls, stadiums and community centers. Mosques in the region opened to offer shelter.

The quake, whose center was in Kahramanmaras province in southeastern Turkey, sent residents of Damascus and Beirut running into the streets and was felt as far away as Cairo.

Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay said such a disaster can strike “once in a hundred years.” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan noted that officials do not know how high the death and injury toll will rise.

Erdogan declared seven days of national mourning. National flags will fly at half-mast across the country and at its diplomatic missions abroad.

The earthquake caused more misery in a region that has suffered greatly in the last decade. On the Syrian side, the affected area is divided between government-controlled territory and the last opposition-held enclave, which is surrounded by Syrian forces with Russian support. Meanwhile, Turkey is hosting millions of refugees from the Syrian civil war.

In a rebel-held enclave in Syria, hundreds of families were trapped in the rubble, according to a statement from the emergency opposition organization White Helmets. The area has some 4 million people displaced from other parts of the country because of the war. Many of them live in buildings that were already damaged by shelling.

Battered medical centers and hospitals quickly filled up with wounded, according to rescuers. Others, such as a maternity hospital, had to be evacuated, according to the medical organization SAMS.

The region is located in a major earthquake fault zone and experiences frequent earthquakes. Some 18,000 people were killed in 1999 in a series of earthquakes in the northwestern part of the country.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimated the magnitude of the quake at 7.8 with a depth of 18 kilometers (11 miles). Hours later, another 7.5-magnitude quake struck more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) away.

The second jolt in the afternoon caused a multi-story apartment building to collapse head-on onto the street in the Turkish city of Sanliurfa. The structure was left in rubble and raised a cloud of dust amid screams from passersby, according to a video of the incident.

The quake destroyed thousands of buildings from the Syrian cities of Aleppo and Hama to Turkey’s Diyarbakir, more than 330 kilometers (200 miles) away to the northeast.

In Turkey alone, more than 5,600 buildings were destroyed, officials said. Hospitals were damaged and one collapsed in the city of Iskenderun.

More than 1,600 people were killed in 10 Turkish provinces, with more than 11,000 injured, officials said. The death toll in government-controlled areas of Syria rose to 570, with some 1,400 injured, according to the Health Ministry. Some 450 were also reported dead in rebel-held areas of the country, and hundreds injured.

The freezing temperatures may reduce the window of time rescuers have to rescue survivors, said Dr. Steven Godby, an expert on natural disasters at Nottingham Trent University. The difficulties of working in areas affected by civil war would only complicate rescue efforts, he added.

Dozens of countries, as well as the European Union and NATO, offered aid, whether in the form of medical supplies, rescue teams or money. The vast majority was for Turkey, with pledges of aid from Russia and even Israel for the Syrian government, but it was unclear whether they would come to the devastated rebel-held area in the northwest.

The opposition group Syrian Civil Defense said the situation in the enclave was “disastrous.”

 

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