The death toll from the powerful earthquakes that have rocked Turkey and neighbouring Syria on Monday has surpassed 3400, with thousands more injured.
Rescuers are now racing against time in extreme weather conditions after the 7.8 magnitude quake struck south-eastern Turkey and northern Syria, trapping residents under mounds of rubble.
An official with Turkey’s disaster management authority said more than 7800 people had been rescued across 10 provinces. The official, Orhan Tatar, said 5606 buildings had collapsed.
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At least 2379 people were killed in 10 Turkish provinces, with nearly 15,000 injured, according to Turkish authorities.
The death toll in government-held areas of Syria climbed to 656 people, with some 1400 injured, according to the Health Ministry.
In the country’s rebel-held northwest, groups that operate there said at least 450 people died, with many hundreds injured.
In some places around Turkey, survivors could be heard screaming from beneath collapsed buildings.
“I don’t have the strength anymore,” one survivor could be heard calling out from beneath the rubble of another building in Adana as rescue workers tried to reach him, said Muhammet Fatih Yavuz, a local resident.
Thousands of search-and-rescue personnel, firefighters and medics were working across 10 provinces, along with about 3500 soldiers.
Tens of thousands who were left homeless in Turkey and Syria faced a night in the cold.
In Turkey’s Gaziantep, a provincial capital about 33km from the epicentre, people took refuge in shopping malls, stadiums and community centres.
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Mosques around the region were opened to provide shelter.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared seven days of national mourning.
At least 20 aftershocks followed the initial earthquake, which the US Geological Survey (USGS) says was centred about 33km from Gaziantep and was 18km deep.
A second shock hit central Turkey on Monday afternoon (9.24pm AEDT) at magnitude 7.5 and a depth of 10km, according to the USGS.
The centre of the tremor was about four kilometres out of Ekinözü to the north-east of the earlier earthquake. The damage and death toll from the latest tremor is unknown.
The second jolt in the afternoon caused a multi-story apartment to topple face-forward onto the street in the Turkish city of Sanliurfa, smashing into rubble and raising a cloud of dust as bystanders screamed, according to video of the scene.
Orhan Tatar, an official from Turkey’s disaster management agency, said it was a new earthquake, but Yaareb Altaweel, a seismologist with the USGS, said it was considered an aftershock because it took place on the same fault line as the first.
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The second tremor was felt as far as the eastern Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus, where people took to social media to post footage of swaying curtains, while employees working in some high-rise buildings in the capital, Nicosia, quickly rushed outside.
A third, but slightly less intense 6.0 magnitude earthquake, came two hours later and hit around 5.6km southwest of Göksun in Kahramanmaras, Turkey.
It’s not believed any Australians have been impacted by the devastation in the region.
“At this stage, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is not aware of any Australian casualties in the region,” a statement issued on Monday night said.
“We continue to monitor the situation closely with our missions in Ankara, Istanbul, and Beirut.
“Australians affected by the earthquake and its aftershocks are advised to follow the directions of local authorities.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said all Australians were “deeply saddened by the tragic loss of life and terrible devastation”.
Turkey sits on top of major fault lines and is frequently shaken by earthquakes. Some 18,000 were killed in powerful earthquakes that hit northwest Turkey in 1999.
Search for survivors is against the clock
Hundreds are still believed to be trapped under rubble, and the death toll is expected to rise as rescue workers searched mounds of wreckage in cities and towns across the area.
Thousands of buildings were reported collapsed in a wide area extending from Syria’s cities of Aleppo and Hama to Turkey’s Diyarbakir, more than 330km to the northeast.
A hospital came down in the Mediterranean coastal city of Iskenderun, but casualties were not immediately known, Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay said.
Such severe damage typically leads to a significant death toll, but bitterly cold temperatures could make matters even worse, reducing the timeframe that rescuers have to save trapped survivors, said Dr Steven Godby, an expert in natural hazards at Nottingham Trent University in the UK.
He added that the difficulty of working in areas beset by civil war would only complicate rescue efforts.
Televisions stations in Turkey aired screens split into four or five, showing live coverage from rescue efforts in the worst-hit provinces.
In the city of Kahramanmaras, rescuers pulled two children alive from the rubble, and one could be seen lying on a stretcher on the snowy ground.
Offers of help — from search-and-rescue teams to medical supplies and money — poured in from dozens of countries, as well as the European Union and NATO.
The vast majority were for Turkey, with Russian and even an Israeli promise of help to the Syrian government, but it was not clear if any would go to the devastated rebel-held pocket in the northwest.
In Turkey, people trying to leave the quake-stricken regions caused traffic jams, hampering efforts of emergency teams.
Mosques around the region were opened to provide shelter for people unable to return to damaged homes amid temperatures that hovered around freezing.
Turkey’s minister of education said schools throughout the country’s 81 provinces would be closed until February 13 following the deadly earthquake.
Schools were closed for a two-week holiday and were set to open Monday but had remained shut in some cities because of snowstorms.
In Diyarbakir, hundreds of rescue workers and civilians formed lines across a mountain of wreckage, passing down broken concrete pieces, household belongings and other debris as they searched for trapped survivors while excavators dug through the rubble below.
In northwest Syria, the quake added new woes to the opposition-held enclave centred on the province of Idlib, which has been under siege for years, with frequent Russian and government airstrikes. The territory depends on a flow of aid from nearby Turkey for everything from food to medical supplies.
The opposition’s Syrian Civil Defence described the situation there as “disastrous”.
At a hospital in Idlib, Osama Abdel Hamid said most of his neighbours died.
He said their shared four-story building collapsed just as he, his wife and three children ran toward the exit.
A wooden door fell on them and acted as a shield.
“God gave me a new lease on life,” he said.
In the small Syrian rebel-held town of Azmarin in the mountains by the Turkish border, the bodies of several dead children, wrapped in blankets, were brought to a hospital.
The Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums in Syria said the earthquake has caused some damage to the Crusader-built Marqab, or Watchtower Castle, on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean.
Part of a tower and parts of some walls collapsed.
In Turkey, meanwhile, the quake damaged a historic castle perched atop a hill in the centre of the provincial capital of Gaziantep, about 33km from the epicentre.
Parts of the fortresses’ walls and watch towers were levelled and other parts heavily damaged, images from the city showed.
First deadly quake struck as people slept
On both sides of the border, residents jolted out of sleep by the pre-dawn quake rushed outside on a cold, rainy and snowy winter night, as buildings were flattened and strong aftershocks continued.
Rescue workers and residents in multiple cities searched for survivors, working through tangles of metal and giant piles of concrete.
A hospital in Turkey collapsed and patients, including newborns, were evacuated from a handful of facilities in Syria.
In the Turkish city of Adana, one resident said three buildings near his home collapsed. “I don’t have the strength anymore,” one survivor could be heard calling out from beneath the rubble as rescue workers tried to reach him, said the resident, journalism student Muhammet Fatih Yavus.
Farther east in Diyarbakir, cranes and rescue teams rushed people on stretchers out of a mountain of pancaked concrete floors that was once an apartment building.
The quake, felt as far away as Cairo, was centred north of Gaziantep, a Turkish provincial capital.
It struck a region that has been shaped on both sides of the border by more than a decade of civil war in Syria.
On the Syrian side, the swath affected is divided between government-held territory and the country’s last opposition-held enclave, which is surrounded by Russian-backed government forces.
Turkey, meanwhile, is home to millions of refugees from that conflict.
The opposition-held regions in Syria are packed with some four million people displaced from other parts of the country by the fighting.
Many of them live in buildings that are already wrecked from past bombardments.
Hundreds of families remained trapped in rubble, the opposition emergency organisation, called the White Helmets, said in a statement.
Strained health facilities and hospitals were quickly filled with wounded, rescue workers said.
Others had to be emptied, including a maternity hospital, according to the SAMS medical organisation.
“We fear that the deaths are in the hundreds,” Muheeb Qaddour, a doctor, said by phone from the town of Atmeh.
“Unfortunately, at the same time, we are also struggling with extremely severe weather conditions,” Oktay told reporters.
Nearly 2800 search and rescue teams have been deployed in the disaster-stricken areas, he said.
In Damascus, buildings shook and many people went down to the streets in fear.
The quake jolted residents in Lebanon from beds, shaking buildings for about 40 seconds.
Many residents of Beirut left their homes and took to the streets or drove in their cars away from buildings, terrorised by memories of the 2020 port explosion that wrecked a large portion of the city.
Huseyin Yayman, a legislator from Turkey’s Hatay province, said several of his family members were trapped under the rubble of their collapsed homes.
“There are so many other people who are also trapped,” he told HaberTurk television by telephone.
“There are so many buildings that have been damaged. People are on the streets. It’s raining, it’s winter.”