The death toll from two very strong earthquakes on Turkey’s border with Syria is rising as thousands of buildings have collapsed and many people are left under rubble.

The tremors, rain and snow, combined with the drop in temperatures at night, are further complicating the situation for the trapped and homeless, as well as hampering the work of rescue teams.

The first earthquake at 4:17 am (local time) found the residents asleep.

“My wife and children and I ran to the door of our apartment, which was on the third floor. As soon as we opened it, the whole building collapsed,” said Osama Abdelhamid, a resident of Azmarin, a Syrian village on the border with Turkey. Osama is currently undergoing treatment at the Al-Rahma hospital in the city of Darkus. Within seconds, he was trapped in the rubble of a four-story apartment building, but “God saved him,” as he says. His family was also saved.

“Walls collapsed on us, but my son managed to get out, he started screaming. People gathered and took us out,” he says excitedly. All his neighbors were killed.

The hospital in Al-Rahma is overflowing with people, ambulances are constantly bringing the wounded, many of them children. They also carried 30 dead.

In Syria, in territories controlled by rebels and jihadists, at least 390 people have died. In the provinces controlled by Damascus, 538 victims have so far been recorded.

According to Vice President Fuat Oktay, 1,541 people have died in Turkey and at least 9,733 people have been injured.

“My sister and her three children are under the rubble. So did her husband, father-in-law and mother-in-law. Seven members of our family,” Mukhitin Oraksi said in the morning in front of the ruins of a building in Diyarbakir, southeast Turkey.

Melissa Salman, a 23-year-old journalist from Kahramanmaras, says she is used to living in earthquake conditions. “But this is the first time I’ve come across something like this,” she explains. “We thought it was the Apocalypse,” he continues.

Bad weather in this mountainous region has paralyzed the main airports around Diyarbakir and Malatya, where heavy snowfalls continue. Those who escaped the earthquake, but were left homeless, found themselves in pajamas on the street in the cold.

“We hear voices here and there below. We think about 200 people were trapped under the rubble,” the rescuer said, referring to the collapsed building in Diyarbakır.

In the face of this catastrophe, residents everywhere are mobilizing and trying to remove rubble with their hands or shovels.

In Hama, in central-western Syria, rescuers and civilians manually pulled bodies out of a building. Among them was a child. In Kdararis, further north, a depressed man mourns the death of his son, a little boy who holds him in his arms, refusing to part with him. In this village on the border with Turkey, at least 40 houses collapsed like paper towers.

The residents have no technology and are digging with household tools and with their own hands to find survivors. “My whole family is buried here. My sons, my daughter, my son-in-law, there is no one to take them out,” says Ali Batal.

In Aleppo, Syria, 37-year-old Anas Habake, as soon as he felt an earthquake, went after his son and shouted to his pregnant wife to come down at the entrance of their three-story apartment building.

“We went down the stairs like crazy, and as soon as we got outside, we saw dozens of terrified families. Some were on their knees and praying, others were crying as if the Day of Judgment had come,” he said.

Source: APE-MPE, AFP.