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The 2023 Turkey–Syria Earthquakes
Twin magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 shocks on the East Anatolian Fault that killed nearly 60,000 people in southern Turkey and northern Syria
At 4:17 a.m. on February 6, 2023, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck southern Turkey near Pazarcık, in Kahramanmaraş Province, and about nine hours later a second shock of magnitude 7.5 struck near Elbistan, some 90 kilometers to the north. Together they ruptured hundreds of kilometers of fault and shook a region home to about 14 million people in Turkey and millions more in northern Syria, many of them refugees or people displaced by Syria's civil war. Tens of thousands of buildings collapsed in freezing winter weather. With nearly 60,000 dead across the two countries, it was the deadliest earthquake in the history of the modern Turkish republic and the deadliest anywhere since the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
The first shock began on a splay of the East Anatolian Fault and ran along the main fault for about 350 kilometers, from near Antakya in the southwest toward Malatya in the northeast. The second ruptured the Çardak fault, a branch to the north. The East Anatolian Fault is a left-lateral strike-slip boundary along which the Anatolian Plate is pushed west, away from the converging Arabian and Eurasian plates, the counterpart to the North Anatolian Fault across the north of the country. Eleven Turkish provinces were declared disaster zones, with the worst damage in Hatay, Kahramanmaraş, Adıyaman, Malatya, Gaziantep and Osmaniye. Much of Antakya, the ancient Antioch, was destroyed. In Syria, damage was heaviest in Aleppo, Idlib, Latakia and Hama, including opposition-held areas of the northwest.
Turkey's interior ministry put the country's toll at 53,537 in February 2024. In Syria, the government then in power reported about 1,400 deaths in areas it controlled and authorities in the opposition-held northwest reported about 4,500, a total near 6,000, while some UN figures were higher, near 8,500. More than 100,000 people were injured in Turkey alone, and millions were left homeless. Aid to northwestern Syria was slowed by the few border crossings open at the time. In Turkey, attention turned to construction, as many collapsed buildings had been built or legalized under construction amnesties despite codes tightened after the 1999 İzmit earthquake, and hundreds of contractors and officials faced prosecution. The World Bank estimated direct damage in Turkey at about 34 billion US dollars.