MARMARIS, Turkey: Firefighters using planes and helicopters, and locals with buckets of water, battled wildfires raging for a sixth day near southern coastal resorts in drought-hit Turkey on Monday.
Meanwhile the government faced fresh criticism of its handling the disaster.
Seven fires were still burning, fanned by temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104°F), strong winds and low humidity, Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli said.
Meteorology maps show areas affected by fires have suffered severe drought in recent months.
Drone footage filmed by Reuters showed grey hillsides near the resort of Marmaris where fires left smoldering buildings and blackened tree trunks.
While 16 planes and 51 helicopters tackled blazes across a swathe of southwest Turkey, villagers carrying water containers up a hill to fight a fire near Marmaris said the government was not doing enough to help them.
“We are here as the entire village, from the locals to others. We didn’t run or anything, so the government must see this and also not run away. It must send some of its planes here,” a woman called Gulhan told Reuters.
Engin Ozkoc, a senior figure in the main opposition CHP, called on Pakdemirli to resign for failing to adequately prepare.
“You don’t deserve that ministry. You didn’t foresee this and buy firefighting planes,” he said, criticizing the amount of aerial resources available.
The European Union said it had helped mobilize three fire-fighting planes on Sunday. One from Croatia and two from Spain joined teams from Russia, Iran, Ukraine and Azerbaijan.
President Tayyip Erdogan’s communications director, Fahrettin Altun, rejected criticism of the government’s handling of the fires and condemned a social media campaign calling for foreign help.
“Our Turkey is strong. Our state is standing tall,” Altun said on Twitter, describing most information about the fires on social media as “fake news.” “All our losses will be compensated for.”
Eight people have been killed in the wildfires, but there were no reports of further casualties on Monday.
Since Wednesday, thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes and some tourists have left their hotels, although Tourism Minister Mehmet Ersoy said holidaymakers had returned within hours.
The wildfires are another blow to Turkey’s tourism industry following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bulent Bulbuloglu, head of the South Aegean Hoteliers Association, said 10 percent of reservations had been canceled in Bodrum and Marmaris. Others had cut their visits short.
Wildfires blaze on in drought-hit Turkey as criticism grows
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Wildfires blaze on in drought-hit Turkey as criticism grows
- Seven fires were still burning, fanned by temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius, strong winds and low humidity, Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli said
- Meteorology maps show areas affected by fires have suffered severe drought in recent months
Thousands of Libyans gather for the funeral of Qaddafi’s son who was shot and killed this week
- As the funeral procession got underway and the crowds swelled, a small group of supporters took Seif Al-Islam’s coffin away and later performed the funeral prayers and buried him
- Authorities said an initial investigation found that he was shot to death but did not provide further details
BANI WALID, Libya: Thousands converged on Friday in northwestern Libya for the funeral of Seif Al-Islam Qaddafi, the son and one-time heir apparent of Libya’s late leader Muammar Qaddafi, who was killed earlier this week when four masked assailants stormed into his home and fatally shot him.
Mourners carried his coffin in the town of Bani Walid, 146 kilometers (91 miles) southeast of the capital, Tripoli, as well as large photographs of both Seif Al-Islam, who was known mostly by his first name, and his father.
The crowd also waved plain green flags, Libya’s official flag from 1977 to 2011 under Qaddafi, who ruled the country for more than 40 years before being toppled in a NATO-backed popular uprising in 2011. Qaddafi was killed later that year in his hometown of Sirte as fighting in Libya escalated into a full-blown civil war.
As the funeral procession got underway and the crowds swelled, a small group of supporters took Seif Al-Islam’s coffin away and later performed the funeral prayers and buried him.
Attackers at his home
Seif Al-Islam, 53, was killed on Tuesday inside his home in the town of Zintan, 136 kilometers (85 miles) southwest of the capital, Tripoli, according to Libyan’s chief prosecutor’s office.
Authorities said an initial investigation found that he was shot to death but did not provide further details. Seif Al-Islam’s political team later released a statement saying “four masked men” had stormed his house and killed him in a “cowardly and treacherous assassination,” after disabling security cameras.
Seif Al-Islam was captured by fighters in Zintan late in 2011 while trying to flee to neighboring Niger. The fighters released him in June 2017, after one of Libya’s rival governments granted him amnesty.
“The pain of loss weighs heavily on my heart, and it intensifies because I can’t bid him farewell from within my homeland — a pain that words can’t ease,” Seif Al-Islam’s brother Mohamed Qaddafi, who lives in exile outside Libya though his current whereabouts are unknown, wrote on Facebook on Friday.
“But my solace lies in the fact that the loyal sons of the nation are fulfilling their duty and will give him a farewell befitting his stature,” the brother wrote.
Since the uprising that toppled Qaddafi, Libya plunged into chaos during which the oil-rich North African country split, with rival administrations now in the east and west, backed by various armed groups and foreign governments.
Qaddafi’s heir-apparent
Seif Al-Islam was Qaddafi’s second-born son and was seen as the reformist face of the Qaddafi regime — someone with diplomatic outreach who had worked to improve Libya’s relations with Western countries up until the 2011 uprising.
The United Nations imposed sanctions on Seif Al-Islam that included a travel ban and an assets freeze for his inflammatory public statements encouraging violence against anti-Qaddafi protesters during the 2011 uprising. The International Criminal Court later charged him with crimes against humanity related to the 2011 uprising.
In July 2021, Seif Al-Islam told the New York Times that he’s considering returning to Libya’s political scene after a decade of absence during which he observed Middle East politics and reportedly reorganized his father’s political supporters.
He condemned the country’s new leaders. “There’s no life here. Go to the gas station — there’s no diesel,″ Seif Al-Islam told the Times.
In November 2021, he announced his candidacy in the country’s presidential election in a controversial move that was met with outcry from anti-Qaddafi political forces in western and eastern Libya.
The country’s High National Elections Committee disqualified him, but the election wasn’t held over disputes between rival administrations and armed groups.
