The toll continues to rise from the major two earthquakes and their aftershock tremors that struck the border region between Syria and Turkey just before dawn today 06 February 2023, the numbers are in thousands killed, injured, and missing under the rubble.
I received a phone call from a frightened relative as I was trying to sleep late at night, it was "Everybody is on the streets, the buildings are shaking.. it's an earthquake.."
It was before 5 am Damascus local time, my relatives live on a higher floor in a 9-floors building in the suburb of Damascus, then social media started flooding with messages, everyone is checking on everyone else.
Syrians are used to their buildings shaking from Israeli repeated bombing giving a hand to ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorists in their massacres across the country, this is something very different, the entire buildings were swinging, my relative tried to explain how the furniture was moving from one side to the other in the rooms.
Two consecutive major earthquakes at 10 kilometers depth, the first of 7.5 - 7.9 degrees on the Richter scale, depending on the source, and the second recorded 5.5 degrees, at the same depth, the epicenter is in the northeast of Gazientap, a Syrian city in Kilikia under the Turkish rule.
The tremors shook all of Syria, were felt in the Jordanian capital Amman, the Iraqi capital Baghdad and reports of people feeling it in Cyprus, Greece and southern Italy, they were mostly felt in the Syrian provinces of Aleppo, Idlib, Latakia, and Hama, and many buildings started collapsing burying and trapping hundreds of people under their rubble.
Syria called on a country-wide mobilization of all able individuals and for all public and private entities to help, Syrian President Assad held an urgent meeting with the full cabinet in the early morning hours and the army was dispatched to help in the relief efforts along with the Civil Defense, the Red Crescent, all the cadres of the ministries of Health, Social Affairs, Interior (police and security), the Students Union, and everybody else.
In the past 2.5 years, I've been warning of earthquakes, it was coming as minor quakes, the warnings are based on a study by the former director of Syria's National Geology Org back in November 2000 titled: Syria Enters the Earthquake Era.
More in this report: Natural Disaster in Syria: 237 Killed, 639 Injured in Major Earthquakes.
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