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ISTANBUL: The death toll from wildfires outside the city of Bursa in northwest Turkiye rose to four late Sunday after two volunteer firefighters died.
The pair died in hospital after they were pulled from a water tanker that rolled while heading to a forest fire, news agency IHA reported. Another worker died earlier at the scene of the accident and a firefighter died Sunday after suffering a heart attack.
Their deaths raised Turkiye’s wildfire fatalities to 17 since late June, including 10 rescue volunteers and forestry workers killed Wednesday in a fire in Eskisehir, western Turkiye.
Huge fires around Bursa, Turkiye’s fourth-largest city, broke out over the weekend, leading to more than 3,500 people fleeing their homes. On Monday morning, fog-like smoke from ongoing fires and smoldering foliage hung over the city.
Unseasonably high temperatures, dry conditions and strong winds have been fueling the wildfires, with Turkiye and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean experiencing record-breaking heatwaves.
The fires around Bursa were among hundreds to have hit Turkiye over the past month. While firefighting teams have contained the damage to a limited number of homes, vast tracts of forest have been turned to ash.
The water tanker crew comprised volunteers from nearby Bolu province heading to the village of Aglasan, northeast of Bursa, to combat a blaze when the vehicle fell into a ditch while negotiating a rough forest track, IHA reported.
Turkiye battled at least 44 separate fires Sunday, Forestry Minister Ibrahim Yumakli said late Sunday. He identified two fires in Bursa province, as well as blazes in Karabuk, northwest Turkiye, and Kahramanmaras in the south, as the most serious.
The government declared disaster areas in two western provinces, Izmir and Bilecik. Prosecutions have been launched against 97 people in 33 of Turkiye’s 81 provinces in relation to the fires, Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc said.
A crowd of people gathered Sunday evening outside a police station in the village of Harmancik, 57 kilometers (35 miles) south of Bursa, after learning a suspected arsonist was detained there. The angry crowd demanded for the suspect to be handed over to them. The crowd dispersed after police assured them a thorough investigation would be undertaken.

SARAJEVO: Bullet holes still pockmark many Sarajevo buildings; others threaten collapse under disrepair, but street artists in the Bosnian capital are using their work to reshape a city steeped in history.
A half-pipe of technicolor snakes its way through the verdant Mount Trebevic, once an Olympic bobsled route — now layered in ever-changing art.
“It’s a really good place for artists to come here to paint, because you can paint here freely,” Kerim Musanovic told AFP, spraycan in hand as he repaired his work on the former site of the 1984 Sarajevo Games.
Retouching his mural of a dragon, his painting’s gallery is this street art hotspot between the pines.
Like most of his work, he paints the fantastic, as far removed from the divisive political slogans that stain walls elsewhere in the Balkan nation.
“I want to be like a positive view. When you see my murals or my artworks, I don’t want people to think too much about it.
“It’s for everyone.”
During the Bosnian war, 1992-1995, Sarajevo endured the longest siege in modern conflict, as Bosnian Serb forces encircled and bombarded the city for 44 months.
Attacks on the city left over 11,500 people dead, injured 50,000 and forced tens of thousands to flee.
But in the wake of a difficult peace, that divided the country into two autonomous entities, Bosnia’s economy continues to struggle leaving the physical scars of war still evident around the city almost three decades on.
“After the war, segregation, politics, and nationalism were very strong, but graffiti and hip-hop broke down all those walls and built new bridges between generations,” local muralist Adnan Hamidovic, also known as rapper Frenkie, said.
Frenkie vividly remembers being caught by police early in his career, while tagging trains bound for Croatia in the northwest Bosnian town of Tuzla.
The 43-year-old said the situation was still tense then, with police suspecting he was doing “something political.”
For the young artist, only one thing mattered: “Making the city your own.”
Graffiti was a part of Sarajevo life even during the war, from signs warning of sniper fire to a bulletproof barrier emblazoned with the words “Pink Floyd” — a nod to the band’s 1979 album The Wall.
Sarajevo Roses — fatal mortar impact craters filled with red resin — remain on pavements and roads around the city as a memorial to those killed in the strikes.
When he was young, Frenkie said the thrill of illegally painting gripped him, but it soon became “a form of therapy” combined with a desire to do something significant in a country still recovering from war.
“Sarajevo, after the war, you can imagine, it was a very, very dark place,” he said at Manifesto gallery where he exhibited earlier this year.
“Graffiti brought life into the city and also color.”
Sarajevo’s annual Fasada festival, first launched in 2021, has helped promote the city’s muralists while also repairing buildings, according to artist and founder Benjamin Cengic.
“We look for overlooked neighborhoods, rundown facades,” Cengic said.
His team fixes the buildings that will also act as the festival’s canvas, sometimes installing insulation and preserving badly damaged homes in the area.
The aim is to “really work on creating bonds between local people, between artists.”
Mostar, a city in southern Bosnia, will also host the 14th edition of its annual street art festival in August.
With unemployment nearing 30 percent in Bosnia, street art also offers an important springboard to young artists, University of Sarajevo sociology professor Sarina Bakic said.
“The social context for young people is very difficult,” Bakic said.
Ljiljana Radosevic, a researcher at Finland’s Jyvaskyla University, said graffiti allowed youth to shake off any “nationalist narrative or imposed identity.”
“It’s a way of resisting,” Radosevic said.