At least 67 people killed, injuring hundreds more and triggering landslides that were hindering the rescue effort, officials said.
“We are in the process of setting up three emergency relief camps,” according to Mojtaba Nikkerdar, the deputy governor of Iran’s Kermanshah province said in a statement.
The quake hit 30 kilometers (19 miles) southwest of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan at around 9.20 pm, when many people would have been at home, the US Geological Survey said.
Iran’s emergency services chief Pir Hossein Koolivand said it was “difficult to send rescue teams to the villages because the roads have been cut off... there have been landslides.”
The worst-hit towns in Iran were Qasr-e Shirin in Kermanshah and Azgaleh, about 40 kilometers northwest, IRNA said.
It added that 30 Red Cross teams had been sent to the quake zone, parts of which had experienced power cuts.
A child and an elderly person were killed in Kalar, according to the director of the hospital in the town about 70 kilometers south of Darbandikhan, and 105 people injured.
On the Iranian side of the border, the tremor shook several cities in the west of the country including Tabriz.
The quake struck along a 1,500 kilometer fault line between the Arabian and Eurasian tectonic plates, a belt extending through western Iran and into northeastern Iraq.
The area sees frequent seismic activity.
A catastrophic quake that struck Bam, in Iran, in 2003 killed at least 31,000 people and flattened the city.
Since then, Iran has experienced at least two major quake disasters, one in 2005 that killed more than 600 and another in 2012 that left some 300 dead.
More recently, a 5.7-magnitude earthquake near Iran’s border with Turkmenistan in May killed two people, injured hundreds and caused widespread damage.
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