A powerful earthquake devastates Turkey and Syria. The death toll is rising.

As night fell, residents and rescue teams continued to dig to find people trapped under buildings that had collapsed on top of them while they slept. More than 7,800 people were rescued in Turkey on Monday, the official Anadolu news agency reported, citing the country’s vice president.

The United States said it was deploying a disaster response team and two urban search and rescue teams to Turkey to help with recovery operations. “U.S.-backed humanitarian partners are also responding to the destruction in Syria,” President Biden said in a statement.

Biden also spoke with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday, the White House said. According to a reading of the appeal, Biden “reaffirmed the willingness of the United States to provide all necessary assistance” to Turkey, a NATO ally.

Erdogan declared seven days of national mourning and said his government was coordinating aid offers from other countries, including Russia and some European countries.

“I wish God’s mercy to our citizens who lost their lives in this great catastrophe, and a speedy recovery to our wounded,” Erdogan said in a speech on Monday. “I hope we leave behind these disastrous days in unity and solidarity as a country and a nation.”

The first earthquake struck at 4:17 a.m. local time in a small district in the southeastern province of Kahramanmaras, Erdogan said, about two hours drive from Syria’s northern border. It was felt as far away as Egypt, Israel and Lebanon. Later in the afternoon, a magnitude 7.5 aftershock also shook the region, its epicenter not far from the first.

Turkey is in an earthquake hotspot. Three tectonic plates – the Arabian, Anatolian and African plates – meet in this region and, as they slide and squeeze together, they build up friction and stress that is released as earthquakes, according to Yaareb Altaweel, a seismologist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado.

Turkey has two major earthquake-causing faults: the 930-mile-long North Anatolian Fault and the over 300-mile-long Eastern Anatolian Fault. Many of Turkey’s largest earthquakes originate from the North Fault, and it has drawn the most attention due to the potential for a major earthquake near Istanbul’s population center.

But this one is thought to have hit along the eastern Anatolia fault zone, which is flying a bit under the radar, with no earthquakes above magnitude 7 “at least since our seismic monitoring network was in place – the 1900s,” Stephen said Hicks, seismologist at University College London.

The lack of The last century’s large earthquakes along this fault, combined with the northward movement of the Arabian Plate, suggest there was pent-up tension in the region, Hicks said.

The initial tremors shook people from their beds and turned an otherwise calm winter night into a cacophony of screams and crashing debris. Videos on social media showed victims and displaced residents in Turkey piled up on thin mattresses in the snow. In rebel-held areas of Syria, including Idlib province and parts of Aleppo, buildings recently destroyed by the earthquake were virtually indistinguishable from the rubble-strewn landscape produced by the civil war.

In the minutes and hours before rescue teams arrived, residents on both sides of the border frantically dug into the remains of their homes, screaming and sobbing as they tried to reach loved ones below. Soon, Turkish and Syrian laborers were extracting survivors from the concrete heaps.

In footage from Turkey, a rescue worker was shown crying and hugging a young girl rescued from an apartment building, falling to her knees in the snow. In northern Aleppo in Syria, a video published by the White Helmets, or Syrian Civil Defense Force, shows volunteers extracting a young boy from under the pancake mound that was once his home. He comes out barefoot and covered in dust.

But the grim escalation in the death toll continued throughout the day and night as authorities counted bodies in the rubble and injured survivors died on hospital beds.

As of 4:30 a.m. local time on Tuesday, Turkish authorities had recorded nearly 3,000 dead and more than 15,000 injured. In Syria, state media reported more than 700 deaths in provinces controlled by President Bashar al-Assad. And in the rebel-held northwest, where relief workers have limited capacity after more than a decade of shelling by Assad’s forces, more than 700 people have been reported dead by civil defense forces, with thousands more injured or unreachable.

“The situation is dire,” Kieren Barnes, Syria country director for aid group Mercy Corps, said in a statement, adding that the affected area of ​​the country is hosting more than 1.8 million displaced Syrians.

“Already 4.1 million people were going hungry in northwestern Syria and food insecurity has worsened since the start of the war in Ukraine,” Barnes said.

On Monday morning, the Syrian American Medical Society, which supports 36 medical facilities in northwestern Syria, said four of its hospitals had been damaged and evacuated.

Prior to the earthquake, health facilities in northwestern Syria were already overwhelmed due to an outbreak of cholera, according to Tanya Evans, Syria country director for the International Rescue Committee.

“Even before this tragedy, many did not have access to the health care they critically need,” she said in a statement. “This earthquake is yet another devastating blow to so many vulnerable populations already struggling after years of conflict.

In Turkey, which is also home to 3.6 million Syrian refugees, the government said it placed nearly 340,000 earthquake victims in shelters at schools and universities.

In the town of Sanliurfa, about 150 miles east of the epicenter, an elderly Syrian woman was pulled from the rubble of a six-story building on Monday evening. On Ipekyollu Street, floodlights illuminated a large pile of rubble and diggers plowed through the debris. A dozen people were believed to have been trapped inside, according to Mehmet Karakecili, a paramedic who had been working since 4 a.m.

Then someone thought they heard a voice – and the digging stopped. A crowd of onlookers grows.

“Who would have thought the street you pass by every day would come to this,” said Ibrahim Aydogan, 34, who lived a few blocks away with his parents and siblings and now, like much of town, was stuck outside in the rain.

Within an hour, a survivor had been found, a grandmother from Syria, an aid worker said. She was carried from the rubble, through a column of rescuers, covered with a gold electric blanket. Then they all started digging again, for the rest of his family.

According to the government’s disaster management agency, more than 14,000 emergency responders were involved in rescue operations in southeastern Turkey, and 45 countries, including NATO and EU members European Union, had offered some form of assistance.

Turkey and Syria were already in the throes of a crippling economic crisis as they dealt with the fallout from the war in Syria. An early estimate from the US Geological Survey suggested damage across Turkey could exceed $1 billion.

The question of how to mobilize aid for Syria was more difficult. In both government and rebel-held areas, humanitarian aid is coordinated by the United Nations, which is often subject to bureaucratic obstacles and political interference.

Many Western countries also have frosty relations with Assad, whose government has waged a brutal war against rebel groups since 2011. The United States has no official relationship with the Syrian government and helps maintain a series of international sanctions aimed at a range of areas, including its oil sector and financial transactions.

On Monday, Russia, Assad’s most important ally, said it was offering direct aid to the Syrian government and sending emergency response teams, the Kremlin said in a reading of an appeal between Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin also offered his sincere condolences to Erdogan and confirmed Russia’s “readiness to immediately provide Turkish partners with the necessary assistance to deal with the consequences of this natural disaster”, the Kremlin later said.

Weather conditions and aftershocks risked complicating rescue and recovery efforts, aid workers and experts said. Temperatures in the region are expected to dip to the low to mid-30s overnight Monday through Tuesday morning, with some areas experiencing rain and snow.

Aftershocks, including a potentially larger earthquake, were a major concern.

Alexandra Hatem, a researcher at the US Geological Survey, said the 7.8 magnitude earthquake severed much of the Eastern Anatolia Fault.

“There have been many devastating earthquakes around this area,” she said in a call with reporters on Monday. “And we’re trying to figure out if any of them would lead to a bigger earthquake.”

Loveluck reported from Baghdad, Dadouch from Beirut and Johnson from Washington. Niha Masih in Seoul and Matthew Cappucci, Adam Taylor and Ben Brasch in Washington contributed to this report.