A huge wildfire killed 12 people and injured more than 75 as it ripped through Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast, the health minister said on Friday.
Hundreds of animals have perished in the blaze that roared across the dry landscape.
The fire has left huge areas of charred and blackened land between the cities of Diyarbakir and Mardin, near the border with Syria.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Twelve people had died and 78 people were hurt or experienced smoke inhalation, Turkish Minister of Health Fahrettin Koca said, adding the five people were being treated in intensive care.
Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM), which won many municipalities in the southeast in local elections in March, criticized the government’s intervention as “late and insufficient.”
As the fire spread during the night, the DEM party had urged the government to send bombers, saying fighting the blaze from the ground was “not enough.”
The fire stared on Thursday and quickly threatened five villages. A new blaze broke out on Friday near the village of Ergani, but was brought under control, an Agence France-Presse (AFP) correspondent saw.
An AFP reporter in Diyarbakir Province saw about 100 animals lying dead on the ground in the village of Koksalan.
Residents said that roughly half their flock of about 1,000 sheep and goats had perished.
A local vet, who did not want to give his name, confirmed the deaths and said many of those that survived were being treated for burns.
“We don’t have very clear information on how many animals have been affected, but at the moment, just under half of the survivors will have to be slaughtered because they can’t be saved,” the vet told AFPTV.
Seracettin Bedirhanoglu, a member of the opposition Republican People’s Party and leader of the eastern Van Province, described the images as “unbearable,” urging vets to go to the area to help treat the wounded animals.
“They are defenseless and helpless... In every big fire, they get hurt first. I ask my veterinarian brothers and sisters: please go to the fire zone because they need you,” he wrote on X.
Turkish Minister of the Interior Ali Yerlikaya blamed the fire on “stubble burning,” which started late on Thursday and spread quickly in strong winds, affecting five villages.
The public prosecutor’s office had opened a probe into the cause of the fire, Turkish Minister of Justice Yilmaz Tunc wrote on the X.
Turkey has had 74 wildfires so far this year, which have ravaged 12,910 hectares of land, according to the European Forest Fire Information System.
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