Erdogan says the earthquake in Turkey is the nation’s worst calamity in 84 years

Nearly 2,000 people from both Turkey and Syria have died as a result of a powerful earthquake that struck near the Syrian border in southeast Turkey.

While it is believed that 783 people perished in Syria, 1,121 people died in Turkey, according to the disaster service.

Rescuers are still likely to find more people as they dig through piles of rubble in the bitterly cold and icy conditions.

The country’s president referred to it as Turkey’s worst calamity in decades.

According to the US Geological Survey, the 7.8 magnitude earthquake occurred in the city of Gaziantep at 04:17 local time (01:17 GMT) with a depth of 17.9 kilometers (11 miles).

The initial earthquake was one of the biggest ever recorded in Turkey, according to seismologists. The survivors reported that the shaking didn’t cease for two minutes.

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Twelve hours later, a second earthquake with a magnitude of 7.5 struck Turkey’s Elbistan area in Kahramanmaras province. This earthquake was felt as screaming and shaking.

The preceding earthquake was “independent” of this one, according to a disaster and emergency management authority official in Turkey.

Turkey is located in one of the seismically active regions of the planet. According to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the catastrophe on Monday was the biggest to hit the nation since the Erzincan earthquake in eastern Turkey in 1939, which claimed approximately 33,000 lives.

However, Turkey’s northwest was the scene of another terrible earthquake in 1999 that claimed more than 17,000 lives.

Melisa Salman, a resident of Kahramanmaras, claimed that although she was accustomed to “being rattled” due to her location in an earthquake zone, Monday’s tremor was “the first time we have ever experienced anything like that.”

We believed it to be the end of the world, she continued.