Turkey earthquake: More aid pledged to worst-hit areas
Hopes to find more survivors are fading now The Turkish government has pledged more aid to thousands of people affected by Sunday's deadly earthquake in the east.
Officials said 12,000 more tents would be delivered to the cities of Ercis and Van and also to nearby villages.
Ankara has been criticised for failing to help some of the most needy who spent the second night in freezing conditions without heating and tents.
At least 279 people are now known to have died and some 1,300 were injured after the 7.2-magnitude earthquake.
Rescue teams with sniffer dogs continued through the night to search for survivors under the rubble of hundreds of collapsed buildings.
Cranes and other heavy equipment have been lifting slabs of concrete, and many residents have been joining in the rescue effort, digging with shovels.
But hopes to find more survivors are fading now, with the officials warning that the death toll is expected to rise further.
'We're freezing'
At the scene
As night fell, rescue work continued by floodlight at some 80 different sites across the town.
Each is a collapsed apartment block shaken to the ground by the fierce earthquake.
At one site, a six-year-old girl called Ellis Janplolat is missing. She'd gone outside to play when the earthquake struck.
Most of the collapsed blocks housed around 100 people and dozens are missing at each of the sites, so the number killed is likely to rise sharply.
Ercis is full of diggers, cranes and volunteers scrambling at the rubble. Among them are four brothers hoping to dig out a fifth brother aged 29, still alive but trapped under his collapsed shop.
Tented encampments have grown up in Ercis and the regional capital Van to house the homeless and those terrified of aftershocks, but this is a high plateau and the temperature falls below zero after dark at this time of year.
So for those camping out and struggling to survive under the broken concrete, it is a long, cold night.
Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay, in charge of the relief operation, said late on Monday that "from today there will be nothing our people lack".
Officials also were setting up more field hospitals and kitchens to help the thousands left homeless or too afraid to return to their homes amid continuing aftershocks.
But some survivors in the ethnic Kurd areas complained that not enough help was reaching them.
"Tents will not be enough - we do not have food, no rescue teams have reached here yet," said Serif Tarakci, an official from the village of Halkali, about 50km (30 miles) from Van.
"It's cold at night, everybody is outside and we're freezing here," the New York Times quoted him as saying.
Another resident of Van said that even tents were in short supply.
"All the nylon tents are in the black market now," Ibrahim Baydar, a 40-year-old tradesman from Van, told Reuters news agency.
"We cannot find any. People are queuing for them. No tents were given to us whatsoever," he said.
Opposition politicians earlier decried what they called "a lack of crisis management", saying that many people still lacked food, heating and tents.
They also said Ankara was wrong to refuse offers of foreign aid.
Ercis, population about 75,000, has been the worst hit, with some 80 collapsed buildings.
Earthquake area
- One of Turkey's most earthquake-prone zones
- Kurdish-populated
- Ercis, an eastern city of 75,000 close to the Iranian border, was the worst-hit
- Van, large ancient city of one million on a lake ringed by mountains, less affected
The BBC's Daniel Sandford, in Ercis, says most of those destroyed buildings are apartment blocks with dozens of people missing at each site.
Both Ercis and the larger city of Van, about 100km (60 miles) to the south, lie on a high plateau surrounded by snow-capped mountains.
'Primitive tools'
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's office said 970 buildings in the earthquake zone had been destroyed.
Mr Erdogan visited the area on Sunday and said many villages made of mud brick had been almost completely destroyed.
Some of the rescue workers have complained of a lack of adequate equipment, said the Hurriyet Daily News.
"We are working with primitive tools, we have no equipment," one rescuer told the Turkish newspaper.
Despite the difficulties, five people were pulled from the ruins of one collapsed building in Ercis on Monday after one of them called for help on his mobile phone, Anatolia news agency said.
Another man was rescued later on Monday, some 30 hours after the earthquake struck.
The earthquake struck at 13:41 (10:41 GMT) on Sunday at a depth of 20km (12 miles), with its epicentre 16km north-east of Van in eastern Turkey, the US Geological Survey said.
About 200 aftershocks have hit the region, it added, including one of magnitude 6.0 late on Sunday.
Turkey is particularly vulnerable to earthquakes because it sits on major geological fault lines.
Two earthquakes in 1999 with a magnitude of more than 7 killed almost 20,000 people in densely populated parts of the north-west of the country.
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