ISTANBUL: The death toll from wildfires on Turkey's southern coast has risen to four and firefighters were battling blazes for a third day on Friday after the evacuation of dozens of villages and some hotels.
More than 60 wildfires have broken out across 17 provinces on Turkey's Aegean and Mediterranean coasts this week, officials have said. The forestry minister said fires raged on in six provinces. Officials have promised to bring to account anyone found responsible for starting them.
Villages and some hotels have been evacuated in areas popular with tourists and television footage has shown people fleeing across fields as they watched fires close in on their homes.
Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli said fires were still blazing in the Mediterranean resort region of Antalya and the Aegean resort province of Mugla.
"We were hoping to contain some of the fires as of this morning but while we say cautiously that they are improving, we still cannot say they are under control," he said.
Wildfires have broken out elsewhere in the region, with more than 40 burning in Greece in the last 24 hours, fanned by winds and soaring temperatures, authorities said. On Tuesday, a blaze tore through a pine forest north of Athens, damaging more than a dozen homes before it was brought under control.
The fires all broke out within two days of one another, according to Turkish Minister of Agriculture and Forestry Bekir Pakdemirli on Friday. Numerous fire-fighting operations had to be coordinated simultaneously across the country, something that rarely happened, he said, adding that emergency workers were now exhausted.
According to Fahrettin Altun, the Turkish president's communications director, a total of 63 fires had been reported by Friday morning.
Flames several metres high, dark palls of smoke and charred landscapes could be seen in television pictures. According to official figures, three people have been killed by the fires so far.
According to state television station TRT, one of the victims was a25-year-old man attempting to support the emergency services in their fire-fighting efforts. Transporting water on his motorbike, the man was involved in a traffic accident and killed.
Pakdemirli also said that livestock and wild animals had died in the flames and large areas of farmland had been destroyed. Several regions had to be evacuated, including hotels in Marmaris and around Bodrum on the Mediterranean coast.
The investigation into the causes of the fire is continuing, Pakdemirli said, adding that he thought continued online speculation about the causes of the fires was unfortunate.
Many social media users in Turkey have suggested that both the sheer number and geographic spread of the fires suggested they could have been started as a terrorist act.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu announced the arrest of three people in connection with the fires on Friday, adding that in Antalya alone, 42 neighbourhoods had suffered fire damage and many households were currently without electricity.
Other regions had taken precautionary measures, such as banning the public from all forestland, Anadolu reported.
According to Pakdemirli, 680 fire-fighting vehicles and more than 4,000 fire-fighters have been deployed, as well as multiple aircraft, drones, helicopters and even a fire-fighting tank.
The condition of Turkey's fire-fighting equipment has been subject of some criticism, however, with Environment Minister Murat Kurum admitting various failings, including a total lack of fire-fighting aircraft, an omission that would now be corrected, he added. - dpa
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