A major earthquake of magnitude 7.9 struck central Turkey and northwest Syria on Monday, killing about 600 people as buildings collapsed across the snowy region, and triggering a search for survivors trapped in the rubble.
\nAccording to international media, the quake, which hit in the early darkness of a winter morning, was also felt in Cyprus and Lebanon.
\n\u201cI have never felt anything like it in the 40 years I\u2019ve lived,\u201d said Erdem, a resident of the Turkish city of Gaziantep, near the quake\u2019s epicentre, who declined to give his surname.
\nTurkey\u2019s disaster agency said\u00a0284 people had been killed, and 440 hurt, as authorities scrambled rescue teams and supply aircraft to the affected area, while declaring a \u201clevel 4 alarm\u201d that calls for international assistance.
\nPresident Tayyip Erdogan spoke by telephone with the governors of eight affected provinces to gather information on the situation and rescue efforts, his office said in a statement.
\nSyrian state media said more than 300\u00a0people were killed and dozens injured there, most in the provinces of Hama, Aleppo and Latakia, where numerous buildings had been brought down.
\n\u201cThe situation is very tragic, tens of buildings have collapsed in the city of Salqin,\u201d a member of the White Helmets rescue organisation said in a video clip on Twitter, referring to a town about five kilometres from the Turkish border.
\nThe rescuer on the clip, which showed a rubble-strewn street, said homes were \u201ctotally destroyed\u201d.
\nMany buildings in the region had already suffered damage in fighting during Syria\u2019s nearly 12-year-long civil war.
\nPeople in Damascus, and in the Lebanese cities of Beirut and Tripoli, ran into the street and took to their cars to get away from their buildings in case they collapsed, witnesses said.
\nIn Turkey\u2019s Gaziantep, Erdem also said people had fled from their shaking homes and were too scared to return.
\n\u201cEverybody is sitting in their cars or trying to drive to open spaces away from buildings,\u201d Erdem said by telephone.
\nThe United States was \u201cprofoundly concerned\u201d about the quake in Turkey and Syria and was monitoring events closely, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Twitter.
\nThe region straddles seismic fault lines and is prone to earthquakes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A major earthquake of magnitude 7.9 struck central Turkey and northwest Syria on Monday, killing about 600 people as buildings collapsed across the snowy region,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4652,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4651\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}