Powerful earthquakes devastate Turkey and Syria

A massive earthquake struck southern Turkey and northern Syria before dawn on Monday, followed hours later by a second powerful tremor, collapsing thousands of buildings and killing tens of thousands of people in one of the deadliest natural disasters in the region's modern history.

The first quake, measured at magnitude 7.8, hit while most people were asleep, bringing down apartment blocks across a wide area and trapping countless residents under rubble. A magnitude 7.5 tremor followed in the afternoon, compounding the destruction. Freezing winter weather hampered rescue efforts and endangered survivors left homeless.

In Turkey, entire neighbourhoods in cities such as Kahramanmaras, Gaziantep and Antakya were reduced to mountains of concrete. In Syria, already shattered by more than a decade of war, the disaster struck regions divided between government and rebel control, complicating the delivery of aid to desperate communities.

Rescuers and volunteers from dozens of countries joined the search for survivors, pulling people alive from the ruins days after the quakes in moments that offered flashes of hope amid overwhelming loss. But as the days passed, the focus shifted from rescue to recovery and to caring for millions left without shelter.

The scale of the catastrophe raised hard questions in Turkey about building standards and enforcement, and about why so many structures had failed. For survivors, the immediate concern was survival itself, as the true toll — eventually counted in the tens of thousands — continued to climb.