Earthquake death toll climbs to more than 400 after villages flattened in seconds

on crumpled vehicles. In an open space away from wrecked housing blocks, men and women, some wrapped in blankets, huddled around a campfire.

A woman and her baby were pulled alive from the rubble, Iranian media reported.

The towns of Eslamabad and Qasr-e Shirin were also affected, while the tremor shook several western Iranian cities including Tabriz.

In Dalahoo County, several villages were totally destroyed, an official told the private Tasnim news agency.

In Iraq, the health ministry said the quake had killed seven people in the northern province of Sulaimaniyah and one in Diyala province to its south.

More than 500 residents were injured in both provinces and the nearby province of Kirkuk.

Footage on Twitter showed many panicked residents fleeing a building in Sulaimaniyah as windows shattered at the moment the earthquake struck.

Images from the nearby town of Darbandikhan showed walls and concrete structures that had collapsed.

Iraqi Kurd Nizar Abdullah, along with neighbours, spent the night sifting through the ruins of a two-storey home next door after it crumbled into concrete debris.

“There were eight people inside,” the 34-year-old said.

Some family members managed to escape, but “neighbours and rescue workers pulled out the mother and one of the children dead from the rubble”.

The quake, which struck at a relatively shallow depth of 23 kilometres, was felt for about 20 seconds in Baghdad, and for longer in other provinces of Iraq.

Iraqi health authorities said they treated dozens of people in the aftermath, mostly for shock.

It was also felt in the UAE, as well as in south-east Turkey, where residents in the town of Diyarbakir were reported to have fled their homes.

The quake struck along a 1,500-kilometre fault line between the Arabian and Eurasian tectonic plates, which extends through west Iran and north-east Iraq.

The area experiences frequent seismic activity.

In 1990, a 7.4-magnitude earthquake in northern Iran killed 40,000 people, injured 300,000 and left half a million homeless, reducing dozens of towns and nearly 2,000 villages to rubble in just seconds.

Thirteen years later, a catastrophic quake flattened much of the ancient south-east Iranian city of Bam, killing at least 31,000.

Iran has experienced at least two major earthquake disasters since, one in 2005 that killed more than 600 and another in 2012 that killed about 300.

It was also felt in the UAE, as well as in south-east Turkey, where residents in the town of Diyarbakir were reported to have fled their homes