Double whammy: A massive, 7.8 temblor kills hundreds in civil war-torn Syria and Turkey

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: A very powerful earthquake, measuring 7.8 on the Richter Scale, hit southern Turkey and northern Syria early on Monday, destroying hundreds of buildings and killing at least 1.300 people, early media reports said, warning of a possible tsunami in the Mediterranean Sea.

The death toll and the number of other victims are likely to multiply sharply, the media reported, adding reports from Lebanon, Egypt, Cyprus, and Greece, which also felt the earthquake, were yet to emerge.

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.

At least 20 aftershocks followed the earthquake, some hours later during daylight, the strongest measuring 6.6, Turkey said.

The Monday quake was centered about 90 kilometers (60 miles) from the Syrian border outside the city of Gaziantep, a major Turkish provincial capital.

But the US Geological Survey said the quake was centered about 33 kilometers (20 miles) from Gaziantep. It was centered 18 kilometers (11 miles) deep.

Hundreds were still believed to be trapped under mounds of rubble, and the toll was expected to rise sharply as rescue workers searched heaps of wreckage in several cities and towns across the affected areas in the two countries.

On both sides of their borders, 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.

Amid inhospitable weather, rescue workers and locals in multiple cities searched for survivors, working through tangles of metal and giant piles of concrete.

In the Turkish city of Adana, reports quoting a survivor said, three buildings near his home collapsed. In Diyarbakir, cranes and rescue teams rushed people on stretchers out of a mountain of pancaked concrete floors that was once an apartment building.

For the victims of the long Syrian civil war, the earthquake came as a double whammy. On the Syrian side of the border, the temblor smashed opposition-held regions packed with some four million people displaced from other parts of Syria. Many of them live in the ruins left by past bombardment. Hundreds of families remained trapped in the rubble, the opposition emergency organization, called the White Helmets, said in a statement.

Rescue workers said that strained health facilities and hospitals were quickly filled with wounded.

The quake, which was felt as far away as Cairo and Beirut, struck a violent region suffering from over a decade of civil war in Syria. Millions of Syrian refugees live in Turkey. The swath of Syria affected by the quake is divided between government-held territory and the country’s last opposition-held enclave, which is surrounded by Russian-backed government forces.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Twitter that search and rescue teams were immediately dispatched to the areas hit by the quake.

Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Agency said at least 284 people were killed in seven Turkish provinces, and 440 people were injured. The death toll in government-held areas of Syria climbed to 237 with over 630 injured. At least 120 people were killed in rebel-held areas.

Buildings collapsed in a cross-border swath extending from Syria’s cities of Aleppo and Hama to Turkey’s Diyarbakir, more than 330 km to the northeast. Nearly 900 buildings were destroyed in Turkey’s Gaziantep and Kahramanmaras provinces, said Vice President Fuat Otkay. A hospital collapsed in the Mediterranean coastal city of Iskanderoun, but casualties were not immediately known, he said.

In Turkey, panicked people trying to leave the quake-stricken regions caused traffic jams, hampering the efforts of emergency teams in reaching the affected areas. Mosques around the region were being opened up as a shelter for people unable to return to damaged homes amid freezing temperatures.

In Diyarbakir, hundreds of rescue workers and civilians searched for trapped survivors while excavators dug through the rubble below. Survivors were strapped to stretchers and put in ambulances.

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.

In Damascus, buildings shook and many panicked people rushed out to the streets.

The quake also jolted residents in Lebanon from their beds, shaking buildings for about 40 seconds. Many residents of Beirut ran out to the streets or drove in their cars away from buildings, terrorized by memories of the 2020 port explosion that wrecked a large swath of the city.