On Monday, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Turkey and Syria. Dr. Abdurrahman Alomar, his family, and other residents in Gaziantep experienced one of the strongest earthquakes to hit the region in more than a century. Alomar, a Syrian doctor and senior health adviser with the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), described being woken in the early morning hours and seeing everyone in the building hastily flee to the surrounding streets, dressed in their pajamas and unarmed.

The magnitude of the earthquake released 250 times more energy than the deadly 6.2 earthquake that struck Central Italy in 2016. As a result, at least 1000 people, most of whom were in the region’s war-torn city of Aleppo, have died in the province of Tinmar alone. Seismologists describe the rupture between the Anatolian and Arabian plates as over 100 km. The earthquake hit