Turkey is experiencing another earthquake, which has already claimed at least three lives, as rescuers are once more looking for victims who may be buried beneath the wreckage.
A 6.4 magnitude earthquake that ravaged both nations on February 6 occurred close to Antakya, Turkey, which is located close to the Syrian border.
In Turkey and Syria, the preceding earthquakes left 44,000 people dead and tens of thousands displaced. On Monday, tremor-weakened buildings toppled in both nations.
According to Turkey’s disaster and emergency ministry, the 6.4 earthquake struck at a depth of 10 kilometers at 20:04 local time (17:04 GMT) (6.2 miles). Three minutes later, a 5.8 aftershock occurred, and then 31 less powerful aftershocks followed.
Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu stated that the three fatalities happened in Antakya, Defne, and Samandag while advising people to stay away from potentially hazardous structures.
Dr. Fahrettin Koca, the health minister, reported 294 injuries, 18 of them critical.
As the earthquake occurred in a region that was mostly deserted after being severely damaged by the quake on February 6, it is believed that the death toll was comparatively low this time.
While paramedics and rescue teams worked to get to the worst-affected neighborhoods, where the walls of severely damaged buildings had crumbled, reports from the city of Antakya described terror and panic in the streets.
“I thought the earth was going to split open under my feet,” local resident Muna al-Omar told Reuters news agency, crying as she held her seven-year-old son. She had been in a tent in a park in the city centre when the new earthquakes hit.
Ali Mazlum, 18, told AFP news agency he had been looking for the bodies of family members from the previous earthquakes when the latest tremors hit.
“You don’t know what to do… we grabbed each other and right in front of us, the walls started to fall,” he said.
The capital of Turkey’s Hatay Province, Antakya, was among the regions most seriously affected by the earthquake on February 6. People in the city of Adana were compelled by the most recent earthquake to go to a volleyball court that had been transformed into a rescue facility after the previous one.
As many as 600 individuals, according to the police, may have arrived over night in search of a robust, ground-floor structure to seek refuge in. Many were said to have fled their homes when the earthquake hit, demonstrating that there is still a great deal of anxiety two weeks after the first calamity.
After the quakes on Monday, which were also felt in other parts of the world, 470 wounded persons are alleged to have visited hospitals in Syria. In a visit to Turkey on Monday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced $100m (£83m) in humanitarian aid, saying that America would help with earthquake recovery “for as long as it takes”.
It is one of several countries to have offered their help in the wake of the first earthquake. Rescue operations had recently been wound down in all but two areas, with hopes of finding people alive fading fast.
