Rescuers in Turkey, Syria search for quake survivors
STORY: As dawn broke over the Syrian city of Aleppo on Tuesday....
... a desperate search was on for survivors of a devastating earthquake.
The magnitude 7.8 quake struck Turkey and Syria in the early hours of Monday....
.... causing entire apartment blocks to crumble to dust and crushing families to death as they slept.
The death toll is in the thousands and is expected to rise further as hundreds remain trapped.
In the southern Turkish province of Hatay,
a man said he could hear the voice of a woman screaming for help under the rubble.
The body of a man laid lifeless beside him.
Nearby, another local resident, who gave his name as Deniz,
was in despair as he says his family are trapped but nobody is coming to help.
Rescue efforts have been hampered by freezing temperatures.
North of Hatay, entire families gather around fires and wrap themselves in blankets to stay warm.
Thousands of people have been left homeless or injured after the disaster.
Drone footage of the region showed the sheer level of destruction caused.
In Syria, a similar level of devastation has been compounded by more than 11 years of civil war.
Even before the earthquake struck, more than 4 million people in the northwest of the country were living in camps and depended on cross-border aid.
Help from abroad is slowly beginning to arrive,
with teams from Serbia, Germany, Romania and Spain landing in southern Turkey on Tuesday.
They brought with them rescue equipment including dogs to assist the search for survivors.
More has been pledged.
Monday's earthquake was the biggest recorded worldwide by the U.S. Geological Survey...
since a tremor in the remote South Atlantic in August 2021.
