Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Courtesy Hussein Akoush/Reuters
Hussein Akoush, a 28-year-old college student in New York City, was sent into a “panic” when a friend in Syria texted him on Monday and told him that an earthquake had caused “massive destruction” to his hometown of Al-Atarib in northwestern Aleppo.
“I saw the magnitude of the earthquake was 7.8. At this point, I realized it was huge,” Akoush, who grew up in Syria and moved to Turkey in 2016, told The Daily Beast. Immediately, he said, “I had to check in on my family in Syria. So I sent messages to all my sisters and my brother, but none of them received my messages.”
Meanwhile, news of the unimaginable destruction had kept rolling in. The two earthquakes had hit Turkey and Syria—both countries Akoush has called home—around 4 a.m. local time on Monday. By Tuesday evening, the death toll had jumped to almost 8,000. With thousands of buildings razed to the ground, and rescue efforts to dig up people buried in the rubble still underway, that number is expected to rise significantly.