Rescuers searched the rubble of collapsed buildings today for survivors and victims of a major earthquake that killed at least 279 people in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey.
Another 1,300 people were injured in yesterday's 7.2 magnitude earthquake - Turkey's strongest in a decade.
Rescue and relief efforts focused on the city of Van and the town of Ercis, 100km to the north.
However, hundreds were also feared dead in remote villages of mud-brick houses.
Some survivors - trapped beneath heaps of smashed concrete and twisted metal - used mobile phones to tell friends they were alive. Throughout the day, rescue workers pulled people out alive.
Thousands of people made homeless by the earthquake were forced to spend a second night outdoors in the hilly, windswept Van region, enduring near-freezing temperatures.
Some groups stayed in tents put up on soccer pitches, living on handouts from aid agencies.
The UN disaster agency said almost 1,000 buildings had collapsed, many of them poorly built.
A Red Crescent spokesman said the agency was preparing to provide refuge for as many as 40,000 people, though it was so far impossible to tell how many would need shelter.
Some residents of Van and outlying villages complained of a lack of government assistance, despite the dispatch of troops, mobile kitchens and up to 13,000 tents.
"We have to fit 37 people in one tent," said Giyasettin Celen, a 29-year-old who lost three family members in Dogonu Koyu, a village beside Lake Van where he said 15 people died.
"Our lost ones were carried like animals, on top of each other, in a transport van. Our main source of income here is livestock breeding, but we don't have anywhere to keep them. We will have to sell them now," he said.
In Van, an ancient city of one million on a lake ringed by snow-capped mountains, cranes shifted rubble from a collapsed six-storey apartment block where 70 people were feared trapped.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan flew to Van to assess the scale of the disaster.
Mr Erdogan said he feared for the fate of villages with houses made of mud brick, saying: "Almost all buildings in such villages are destroyed."
Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said the death toll had reached 279, with 1,300 injured, and more were unaccounted for.
The quake brought fresh torment to impoverished southeast Turkey, where PKK militants fighting a decades-long insurgency killed 24 Turkish troops south of Van last week.
The area it struck, near the border with Iran, is remote and mountainous, with long distances between villages and people who live off stock-raising, arable farming and trading.
The hardest-hit town was Ercis, a town of 100,000, where 55 buildings crumpled, including a student dormitory.
The Red Crescent has delivered 5,000 tents to Ercis alone and a tent city has been set up at Ercis stadium. But residents said tents were being given only to relatives of police and soldiers, a possible source of tension if confirmed.
Rescue efforts were hampered by power outages after the quake toppled electricity lines to towns and villages.
More than 200 aftershocks have jolted the region since the quake, lasting around 25 seconds, struck at 1041GMT on Sunday.
The Red Crescent said about 100 experts had reached the earthquake zone to coordinate rescue and relief operations. Sniffer dogs had joined the quest for survivors.
