More than 1,300 people in Turkey and neighboring Syria have died due to a massive 7.8-magnitude earthquake on Monday.
Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan says 912 people have been killed in Turkey alone, and 5,383 wounded, due to the earthquake.
He says he can’t predict how much the death toll will rise by as search and rescue efforts continue.
This is the country’s largest disaster since 1939, Erdogan tells reporters, adding that 2,818 buildings collapsed as a result.
People were startled out of their beds by the earthquake, which also rattled buildings around the Middle East and was felt as far away as Egypt and Cyprus. A few hours later, a quake with a magnitude of 7.5 struck the same region, increasing the possibility of a fresh humanitarian crisis in an area that had been destroyed by years of war.
The quake hit an area of Syria’s northwest that is divided between government-held territory and the country’s last remaining rebel-controlled enclave. Turkey is home to millions of refugees from the conflict.
At least 248 people were killed in government-controlled areas and 700 were injured, according to the country’s health ministry. In opposition-held areas, members of the opposition emergency organization known as the White Helmets said the earthquake had killed at least 221 people and injured hundreds more.
That takes the combined death toll across the two borders to at least 1,381, with fears it may still rise substantially.
“We were shaken like a cradle. There were nine of us at home. Two sons of mine are still in the rubble, I’m waiting for them,” said a woman with a broken arm and wounds on her face, speaking to Reuters in an ambulance near the wreckage of a seven-story block where she had lived in Diyarbakir in southeast Turkey.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the first quake was centered about 20 miles from Gaziantep, Turkey, a major city and provincial capital, when it struck at 4:17 a.m. local time (8:17 p.m. ET Sunday).