Prisoners mutinied in a northwestern Syria prison Monday following a deadly earthquake, with at least 20 escaping the jail holding mostly Islamic State group members, a source at the facility told AFP.

The military police prison in the town of Rajo near the Turkish border holds about 2,000 inmates, with about 1,300 of them suspected to be IS fighters, said the source.

The prison also holds fighters from Kurdish-led forces.

British author Salman Rushdie said he finds it "very difficult" to write after being stabbed last year, in an interview published Monday ahead of the release of his new novel "Victory City."

Rushdie, whose "epic tale" of a 14th-century woman who defies a patriarchal world to rule a city hits US shelves on Tuesday, said the attack had scarred him mentally.

"There is such a thing as PTSD you know," the 75-year-old told the New Yorker magazine in his first interview since the August 12 stabbing at a conference in Chautauqua in upstate New York.

A stream of cars crawled north out of the shattered city of Sanliurfa, taking traumatised residents a little further from the scene of Turkey's most powerful earthquake in decades.

On the opposite side of the road, a distraught family walked in the freezing rain, their belongings piled into a stroller, looking for shelter to spend the night.

Sanliurfa, one of the bigger cities of southeastern Turkey, was hammered by the massive quake that claimed at least 3,000 lives across the mostly Kurdish region and neighbouring Syria.

British author Salman Rushdie has said he finds it "very difficult" to write after being stabbed in New York last year, in his first interview since the attack.

Rushdie told the New Yorker, in an article published Monday, that the stabbing on stage at an event had left him with mental scars.

"There is such a thing as PTSD you know," the 75-year-old said.

In the quake-devastated town of Jandairis in northern Syria, a dazed father cradles the body of his lifeless baby, saying over and over again, "Wake up, my boy, wake up."

"Ya Allah, ya Allah (My God, my God...)" he sobs, kissing the infant's head. "They have torn my heart out."

Dozens of homes in Jandairis crumpled like a house of cards in this town on the border with Turkey when the earth began to shake at 4:17 am (0117 GMT) on Monday.

Residents used their bare hands and pickaxes to search the rubble for survivors, as that was all they had to get the job done.

Several of Syria's archaeological sites including a famed citadel in the northern city of Aleppo were damaged in a deadly pre-dawn earthquake Monday, the country's antiquities authority said.

"Parts of the Ottoman mill inside the citadel" of Aleppo have collapsed, while "sections of the northeastern defensive walls have cracked and fallen", Syria's Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums said in a statement.

A combination of factors made the powerful earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria early Monday particularly deadly, including its timing, location, relatively quiet fault line and the weak construction of the collapsed buildings, experts said.

More than 2,300 people have been killed by the 7.8-magnitude quake near Turkey's Syrian border, with the toll expected to grow as aftershocks reverberate throughout the day.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Iraqi counterpart on Monday discussed unpaid bills owed to Russian oil companies because of US sanctions over the Ukraine conflict.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein told a Baghdad news conference that he would discuss the issue during a visit to Washington on Wednesday.

"The sanctions should not be imposed on Iraq because its cooperation continues with Russian companies," Hussein told reporters.

Tulin Akkaya had just started to gather her thoughts after being woken by the biggest earthquake to strike Turkey in nearly a century when a second massive jolt sent her scrambling for safety on the street.

Buildings lay in ruins around her southeastern city of Diyarbakir -- home to many of the millions who have fled war and poverty in neighbouring Syria.

The same crescent of devastation stretched across major cities running along the two countries' border in the wake of the 7.8-magnitude pre-dawn quake.

Officials have put the combined death toll at nearly 1,800.

At a hospital in Syria, Osama Abdel Hamid was holding back tears as he recalled on Monday the powerful earthquake that toppled his home and killed his neighbours, along with hundreds of his compatriots.

"We were fast asleep when we felt a huge earthquake," Abdel Hamid told AFP at Al-Rahma hospital in the northwestern Idlib province, where he was being treated for a head injury.

The 7.8-magnitude pre-dawn quake, whose epicentre was near the Turkish city of Gaziantep, wiped out entire sections of cities in Turkey and war-ravaged Syria.