AFIDNES, Greece: Fires raging in Greece claimed their first two lives on Friday during a punishing heatwave, while devastating wildfires in neighboring Turkey piled pressure on the Turkish government.
Greece and Turkey have been fighting blaze upon blaze over the past week, hit by the region’s worst heatwave in decades, a disaster that officials and experts have linked to increasingly frequent and intense weather events caused by climate change.
A UN draft report seen by AFP has warned that the Mediterranean region, which it called a “climate change hotspot,” will be hit by fiercer heatwaves, droughts and fires supercharged by rising temperatures.
Hundreds of people have been evacuated in both countries as temperatures hover between 40 to 45 degrees Celsius (104 to 113 Fahrenheit).
A 38-year-old man from Ippokrateio, a town north of Athens hit by giant flames, died in hospital on Friday after being hit by a falling electric pole as he was riding a moped, the health ministry said.
In the nearby town of Krioneri, Konstantinos Michalos, the president of the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry, was found unconscious in a factory and was transported to hospital where he was also confirmed dead, a hospital source said.
They are the first two deaths recorded from the fires in Greece, while 18 people have been injured, most with respiratory problems or minor burns. Two volunteer firefighters have been hospitalized in a critical condition, local media reported.
In Turkey, some eight people have been killed and dozens more hospitalized during 10 days of fire.
“Our country is facing an extremely critical situation,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said.
“We’re facing unprecedented conditions after several days of heatwave have turned the country into a powder keg.”
North of Athens, a fierce blaze tore through vast areas of pine forest, forcing yet more evacuations of villages overnight and blowing thick, choking smoke all over the Greek capital.
Text alerts were sent out to people in Athens warning of “extreme fire danger in the coming days.”
In the small town of Afidnes, 30 kilometers (12 miles) north of the capital, firefighters were seen standing on their truck in the dead of night, dousing flames that leapt high above them.
In the morning, the fires had left desolation in their wake — burnt cars, trees, and houses destroyed.
In nearby Krioneri, the fire scorched homes, businesses and factories.
“The fire is uncontrollable,” said resident Vassiliki Papapanagiotis. “I don’t want to leave, my whole life is here.”
Part of a motorway linking Athens to the north of the country has been shut down as a precaution.
Around 5,000 residents and tourists were evacuated in the southern Peloponnese town of Gytheio, the ERT channel reported.
Deputy Civil Protection Minister Nikos Hardalias said that out of 99 fires reported on Thursday, 56 were still active.
At least 450 Greek firefighters were fighting the blaze, along with water-dropping air support and reinforcements from France, Switzerland, Romania, Sweden, Israel and Cyprus.
In Turkey, 208 fires have flared up since July 28, and 12 were still ablaze on Friday, according to the presidency.
In one particularly critical event earlier this week, winds whipped up a flash fire that subsumed the grounds of an Aegean coast power plant in Turkey storing thousands of tons of coal.
More evacuations took place on Friday in five Turkish provinces, including tourist hotspots Antalya and Mugla, according to NTV.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has come under withering criticism for being slow or unwilling to accept some offers of foreign assistance after revealing that Turkey had no functioning firefighting planes.
The Turkish government is also facing pressure after the opposition referred to a report which showed only a fraction of the budget for forest fire prevention had been spent.
The General Directorate of Forestry (OGM) spent only 1.75 percent of nearly 200 million Turkish lira ($23 million) allocated for forest fires in the first six months of 2021, main opposition party MP Murat Emir said, referring to numbers apparently from the state agency’s own report.
“This is a situation that one could go as far as to describe as treachery,” he told AFP.
Extreme fires like those in Greece and Turkey will become even worse, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a draft report due out next year seen by AFP.
“Climate change is forcing Mediterranean landscapes into a flammable state more regularly by drying out vegetation and priming it to burn,” said Matthew Jones, research fellow at the University of East Anglia’s Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research.
Greece fires claim first deaths as Turkey under pressure
https://arab.news/8upa3
Greece fires claim first deaths as Turkey under pressure
- Greece and Turkey have been fighting blaze upon blaze over the past week
- A UN draft report seen by AFP has warned that the Mediterranean region will be hit by fiercer heatwaves, droughts and fires supercharged by rising temperatures
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
