Thousands killed as huge earthquake and aftershocks hit Turkey and Syria

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared seven days of national mourning following the deadly quakes that hit the country Monday. Turkish flags will fly at half-staff across the nation and at its diplomatic missions overseas.

The Turkish Vice President, Fuat Oktay, said such a disaster could hit "once in a hundred years," and that his country should be prepared for the death toll — already over 1,600 in Turkey alone — to rise.

Oktay also said some 145 aftershocks were registered following the deadly quake overnight, with three that were larger than 6.0 magnitude.

Turkey's minister of education, meanwhile, extended school closures to cover all 81 of the country's provinces until February 13. Schools were closed for a two-week holiday and had been set to reopen Monday, but many were still closed in some cities because of snowstorms. 

- CBS/AP

A steady stream of injured were flowing into an overwhelmed hospital in the town of Darkush, in rebel-held northwestern Syria on Monday, after a deadly earthquake struck the region. Mothers hovered over crying children.

 Amid the chaos, one man sat with a dazed expression, his face covered with abrasions.

 The man, Osama Abdul Hamid, had barely made it out alive with his wife and four children from his apartment building in the nearby village of Azmarin. Many of their neighbors were not so lucky.

 "The building is four stories, and from three of them, no one made it out," Abdul Hamid said, breaking down in tears. "God gave me a new lease on life."

 At an equally overwhelmed hospital in Idlib city, Shajul Islam, a British doctor who works with several non-governmental organizations, was having the worst day in his seven years working in Syria.

"I'm literally taking a patient off a ventilator to give another patient a chance, having to decide which patient has more of a chance of surviving or not," Islam said. "We've got quite a lot of hospitals that had been previously hit in the war. So they had already the foundations, everything had already been weakened," he said.

With the added blow of the earthquake, he said, "We've had at least three or four hospitals that I know of that have been put out of service."

A civilian rescue agency that has long worked in war-torn Syria said Monday that the death toll in Syria's rebel-held northern regions from the massive earthquake that struck earlier in the day had risen to more than 430.

In a tweet, the White Helmets rescue agency said at least 1,050 more people injured, and it feaered the death toll was likely to keep rising as "hundreds of families" were still believed to be buried under the rubble of severely damaged buildings.

An ancient castle in Turkey was one of the historic monuments damaged when major earthquakes hit the country and neighboring Syria, killing more than 2,000 people on Monday. Images show parts of the Gaziantep Castle, which was first built in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, during the Roman Empire, crumbling after the earthquake.

Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke Monday with his Turkish and Syrian counterparts and expressed his deep condolences over the earthquakes that left more than 2,000 people dead in both countries and to offer Russia's help. 

Putin reaffirmed his readiness to immediately provide Turkey and Syria with help, and the Syrian leader, whom Putin helped to keep in power through a grueling civil war with lethal Russian military aid, quickly accepted, according to the Kremlin.

"Bashar al-Assad gratefully accepted this offer, and in the coming hours rescuers of the Russian emergencies ministry will fly to Syria," the Kremlin said in a statement.

"The Turkish president warmly thanked Vladimir Putin for such a prompt and sincere reaction and said that he was giving instructions to the competent authorities of the country to accept the help of Russian rescuers," it added.

President Joe Biden said he was "deeply saddened by the loss of life and devastation caused by the earthquake" in Turkey in Syria on Monday.

The U.S. leader added that he had instructed staff "to continue to closely monitor the situation" and coordinate with officials in Turkey to provide "any and all needed assistance."

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a statement released not long after, reiterated the condolences on behalf of the American government and said the Biden administration was still "assessing our comprehensive response options."

"I have directed my team to remain in close contact with our Turkish allies and our humanitarian partners in the coming days to determine what the region needs," Blinken said, adding that an "initial assistance response" for Turkey was already underway, "and U.S.-supported humanitarian organizations in Syria are responding to the earthquakes' effects across the country. We are determined to do all that we can to help those affected by these earthquakes in the days, weeks, and months ahead."

Turkey's Vice President Fuat Oktay said Monday that schools in 10 cities and provinces across the country that were affected by the earthquakes would be closed for a week. Those areas include: Hatay, Gaziantep, Kahramanmaraş, Osmaniye, Adıyaman, Malatya, Şanlıurfa, Adana, Diyarbakır and Kilis.

Oktay also said flights to and from the airport in Hatay were suspended and civilian flights were no longer permitted to fly into airports in Maraş and Antep.

Videos emerged on social media Monday showing large fires sending thick smoke into the air in southern Turkey, with people claiming that the powerful earthquakes that hit the region had ruptured natural gas pipelines.

According to BBC News, Turkey's energy minister said there had been serious damage to the country's energy infrastructure, including gas pipes near the epicenter in southeast Turkey, but he did not mention fires or explosions.

The BBC said it had verified one of the social media videos as showing a blaze on the outskirts of the city of Hatay, about 100 miles southwest of Gaziantep, where the first powerful temblor struck.

The European Union said it had mobilized urban search and rescue teams from Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Malta in response to a request from Turkey for assistance through the EU Civil Protection Mechanism after two major earthquakes hit the country on Monday.

The EU also said that its Copernicus satellite system had been "activated to provide emergency mapping services."

It said that it was ready to provide assistance to Syria as well through its humanitarian assistance program.

"Our thoughts are with all those who have lost loved ones and the brave first responders working to save lives," the European Commission said in a statement.

Amman — Jordanian seismologists registered more that 110 aftershocks in the country after the two massive earthquakes hit southeast Turkey on Monday. Head of Jordan's seismology center, Ghassan Sweidan, told local television that "the center is still recording more tremors from time to time."

Residents of the capital Amman, some 425 miles away from the epicenter of the quakes, were woken up at 4:17 a.m. local time by the tremors. Local media reported that part of an old building collapsed in the northern Jordanian city of Irbid, but there were no casualties reported. 

Many Jordanians took to social media to express sympathy with their neighbors. 

"Our hearts and prayers are with all the victims, the injured, and those who lost their homes or loved ones in today's devastating earthquakes," tweeted Jordan's Queen Rania.

A journalist was reporting on live TV Monday after the devastating earthquake in Turkey when the ground began to shake under him and he was forced to flee the area. The video shot by the reporter's camera operator shows buildings collapsing around them as they and others on the street run for safety. Watch here:

Officials from Greenland and Denmark said two massive earthquakes that struck Turkey on Monday registered on seismographs in both countries, as did many of their aftershocks.

"We have registered both earthquakes -- and a lot of aftershocks -- in Denmark and Greenland," Tine Larsen, a seismologist from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, said.

"The waves from the earthquake reached the seismograph on the Danish island of Bornholm approximately five minutes after the shaking started," Larsen told the AFP news agency. "Eight minutes after the earthquake, the shaking reached the east coast of Greenland, propagating further through all of Greenland," she said.

A representative from the White Helmets, a civil defense organization that works in Syria, often rescuing people from bombed-out buildings, called on the international community after Monday's quakes "to save our people."

"Many buildings in different cities and villages in northwestern Syria collapsed, destroyed by this earthquake. Our teams responded to all the sites and the buildings — and still now, many families are under the rubble. We are trying to save them but it's a very hard task for us," Ismail Al Abdullah told CBS News partner network BBC News.

"We need help. We need the international community to do something, to help us, to support us. Northwestern Syria is now a disaster area. We need help from everyone to save our people."

A second large earthquake struck south-eastern Turkey on Monday, Reuters reported, citing Turkey's Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD). AFAD reportedly said the earthquake was magnitude 7.6 and occurred at a depth of four miles.

AFAD said the second quake struck the same region that was hit earlier on Monday by another major earthquake that has left hundreds dead and thousands injured. The epicenter of the second earthquake was the Elbistan region of Kahramanmaras Province, Reuters reported.

The temblor struck a region that's been shaped on both sides of the border by more than a decade of civil war in Syria. On the Syrian side, the swath affected is divided between government-held territory and the country's last opposition-held enclave, which is surrounded by Russian-backed government forces. Turkey, meanwhile, is home to millions of refugees from that conflict.

The opposition-held regions in Syria are packed with some 4 million people displaced from other parts of the country by the fighting. Many of them live in buildings that are already wrecked from past bombardments. Hundreds of families remained trapped in rubble, the opposition emergency organization, called the White Helmets, said in a statement.

Shocked survivors in Turkey rushed out into the snow-covered streets in their pajamas, watching rescuers dig through the debris of damaged homes with their hands.

"Seven members of my family are under the debris," Muhittin Orakci, a stunned survivor in Turkey's mostly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, told Agence France-Presse.

"My sister and her three children are there. And also her husband, her father-in-law and her mother-in-law."

The rescue was being hampered by a winter blizzard that covered major roads in ice and snow. Officials said the quake made three major airports in the area inoperable, further complicating deliveries of vital aid.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the death toll in his nation had risen to 912.  The death toll in government-held areas of Syria climbed to 237 with more than 630 injured, according to Syrian state media. At least 120 people were killed in rebel-held areas, according to the White Helmets, the emergency organization in opposition areas.

The Associated Press contributed reporting.