ISTANBUL: Turkish rescuers distributed food and relocated thousands of people into student dormitories Thursday as the death toll from flash floods that swept across several Black Sea regions rose to nine.
Heavy storms descended on Turkey’s northern stretches just as rescuers reported bringing hundreds of wildfires that have killed eight people since late July under near total control in the south.
Turkey has been grappling with drought and a rapid succession of natural disasters that world scientists believe are becoming more frequent and violent because of climate change.
Heavy rains late Tuesday produced flash floods that turned streets into running rivers and sparked mudslides that buckled roads in three northern regions.
Agriculture and Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli warned on Wednesday that the area was facing “a disaster that we had not seen in 50 or 100 years.”
Rescuers were forced to evacuate a regional hospital holding 45 patients — four of them in intensive care — in the region around the coastal city of Sinop on Wednesday.
Images on television and social media showed water rising to the level of street signs in some towns.
They showed stranded villagers being plucked off rooftops by helicopter and bridges collapsing under the force of the rushing water below.
Turkey’s disaster response authority said nine people had lost their lives in the northern Kastamonu province while the search for a person who disappeared in the northern city of Bartin continued.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s office said he held a phone call with the heads of the affected regions Thursday and promised to provide all state assistance available.
The emergencies authority said more than 1,000 rescuers were working in the region while Turkish Red Crescent teams were distributing food packages and hot meals.
Officials said more than 5,000 spaces had been allocated in student dormitories to shelter those displaced by the floods.
Three villages suffered power cuts and mobile phone services was down in parts of the affected towns.
The disaster struck less than a month after six people died in floods caused by heavy rains in the northeast Rize province.
Turkey’s mountainous Black Sea regions frequently experience heavy rains that produce flash floods and mudslides in the summer months.
Officials said that all but three of the nearly 300 fires that had been ravaging Turkey’s Mediterranean and Aegean coasts since July 28 have been brought under control.
Death toll from Turkey’s flash floods rises to nine
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Death toll from Turkey’s flash floods rises to nine
- Turkey has been grappling with drought and a rapid succession of natural disasters
- Heavy rains late Tuesday produced flash floods that turned streets into running rivers and sparked mudslides
Israel says killed three Iranian commanders in fresh wave of strikes
- Israel’s military said its fighter jets successfully targeted top Iranian official Saeed Izadi
- It also announced the deaths of two other commanders from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards
JERUSALEM: Israel said Saturday it had killed three Iranian commanders in its unprecedented bombing campaign across the Islamic republic, which Foreign Minister Gideon Saar claimed had already delayed Tehran’s presumed nuclear plans by two years.
Israel’s military said its fighter jets successfully targeted top Iranian official Saeed Izadi, in charge of coordination with Palestinian militant group Hamas, in Qom south of Tehran and announced the deaths of two other commanders from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
As Israel continued to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities and military targets, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said in an interview that by the country’s own assessment, it had “already delayed for at least two or three years the possibility for them to have a nuclear bomb.”
“We will do everything that we can do there in order to remove this threat,” Saar told German newspaper Bild, asserting Israel’s onslaught would continue.
Israel and Iran have traded wave after wave of devastating strikes, after Israel launched its aerial campaign on June 13, saying Tehran was on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon — an ambition Iran has denied.
Israel said it had attacked Iran’s Isfahan nuclear site for a second time after its air force said it had also launched salvos against missile storage and launch sites in central Iran.
The military later said it struck military infrastructure in southwest Iran.
US President Donald Trump warned on Friday that Tehran has a “maximum” of two weeks to avoid possible American air strikes, as Washington weighs whether to join Israel’s unprecedented bombing campaign.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrived in Istanbul on Saturday, for a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to discuss the conflict.
Top diplomats from Britain, France and Germany met Araghchi in Geneva on Friday, and urged him to resume talks with the United States that had been derailed by Israel’s attacks.
But Araghchi told NBC News after the meeting that “we’re not prepared to negotiate with them (the United States) anymore, as long as the aggression continues.”
Trump was dismissive of European diplomatic efforts, telling reporters, “Iran doesn’t want to speak to Europe. They want to speak to us. Europe is not going to be able to help in this.”
Trump also said he is unlikely to ask Israel to stop its attacks to get Iran back to the table.
“If somebody’s winning, it’s a little bit harder to do,” he said.
Any US involvement would likely feature powerful bunker-busting bombs that no other country possesses to destroy an underground uranium enrichment facility in Fordo.
A US-based NGO, the Human Rights Activists News Agency, said on Friday that based on its sources and media reports at least 657 people have been killed in Iran, including 263 civilians.
Iran’s health ministry said on Saturday at least 350 people had been killed in the Israeli strikes including military commanders, nuclear scientists and civilians.
Nasrin, 39, who gave only her first name, explained she had been thrown across a room in her Tehran home by an Israeli strike.
“I just hit the wall. I don’t know how long I was unconscious. When I woke up, I was covered in blood from head to toe,” she said as she received treatment at Hazrat Rasool hospital in the Iranian capital.
Traffic police and Fars news agency reported congestion on roads into Tehran on Saturday, indicating some inhabitants were returning to the capital.
Internet access remained highly unstable and limited in Tehran on Saturday, with slow connections and many sites still inaccessible, according to AFP journalists.
Iran’s retaliatory strikes have killed at least 25 people, in Israel, according to official figures.
Overnight, Iran said it targeted central Israel with drones and missiles.
Israeli rescuers said there were no casualties after an Iranian missile struck a residential building in Beit She’an.
At the site of the strike in the north of Israel, mounds of soil had been gouged from the ground and the wall of a ground-floor room destroyed.
Israel’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate said more than 450 missiles have been fired at the country so far, along with about 400 drones.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they had targeted military sites and air force bases.
Western powers have repeatedly expressed concerns about the rapid expansion of Iran’s nuclear program, questioning in particular the country’s accelerated uranium enrichment.
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief Rafael Grossi has said that Iran is the only country without nuclear weapons to enrich uranium to 60 percent.
However, it added that there was no evidence Tehran had all the components to make a functioning nuclear warhead.
Grossi told CNN it was “pure speculation” to say how long it would take Iran to develop weapons.
GCC ambassadors raise concern about safety of nuclear facilities amid Israel-Iran conflict
- The ambassadors warned Grossi during a meeting in Vienna about the “dangerous repercussions” of targeting nuclear facilities
- The warning comes after the Israeli military said at one point that it had struck Iran's Bushehr facility, but later said the comment had been made by mistake
CAIRO: Gulf Cooperation Council ambassadors have expressed concerns to UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi about the safety of nuclear facilities close to their countries amid the Israeli-Iranian crisis, Qatar state news agency reported on Saturday.
The ambassadors warned Grossi during a meeting in Vienna about the “dangerous repercussions” of targeting nuclear facilities.
The warning comes after the Israeli military said at one point on Thursday that it had struck the Russian-built Bushehr facility, but later said the comment had been made by mistake. Bushehr is Iran’s only operating nuclear power plant, which sits on the Gulf coast.
The potential consequences of an attack on the plant — contaminating the air and water — have long been a concern in the Gulf states.
Exiled former Tunisia leader sentenced to 22 years: reports
TUNIS: A Tunis court has sentenced exiled former president Moncef Marzouki in absentia to 22 years in prison for offenses related to “terrorism,” Tunisian media reported on Saturday.
Four other defendants, including his former adviser Imed Daimi and former head of the national bar association Abderrazak Kilani, were also handed the same sentence late Friday.
A staunch critic of President Kais Saied who has been living in France, Marzouki had already been sentenced in absentia to 12 years in prison in two separate cases, one involving “provoking disorder.”
The latest ruling came after a press conference held in Paris, during which he, along with Daimi and Kilani, sharply criticized state institutions and members of the Tunisian judiciary, reports said.
Marzouki, who served as Tunisia’s third president from 2011 to 2014, said in a statement the ruling was “surreal.”
He said it came as part of a “series of verdicts that have targeted some of Tunisia’s finest men and continue to provoke the world’s mockery.”
Tunisia emerged as the Arab world’s only democracy following the ousting of longtime ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, after it kicked off the Arab Spring uprisings.
But since a sweeping power grab by Saied in July 2021 when he dissolved parliament and began ruling by decree, rights groups have warned of a sharp decline in Tunisian civil liberties.
In April, a mass trial saw around 40 public figures, mainly critics of the authorities, sentenced to long terms on charges including plotting against the state.
Other media figures and lawyers also critical of Saied have been prosecuted and detained under a law he enacted in 2022 to prohibit “spreading false news.”
Syrian security forces detain cousin of toppled leader Assad
Syria’s security forces have detained Wassim Assad, a cousin of toppled leader Bashar Assad, state news agency SANA said on Saturday.
Wassim Assad was sanctioned by the United States in 2023 for leading a paramilitary force backing Assad’s army and for trafficking drugs including the amphetamine-like drug captagon.
Bashar Assad was toppled by an Islamist-led rebel insurgency in December and fled to Moscow. Most of his family members and inner circle either fled Syria or went underground.
Syria’s new security forces have been pursuing members of the former administration — mainly those involved in the feared security branches accused of rights abuses.
Rights groups have called for a fully-fledged transitional justice process to hold them to account.
Turkiye’s Erdogan says Israel attacks aimed to sabotage Iran nuclear talks
- Around 40 diplomats are slated to join the weekend gathering of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation
ANKARA: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday that Israel’s attacks on Iran right before a new round of nuclear talks with the United States aimed to sabotage the negotiations, and it showed Israel did not want to resolve issues through diplomacy.
Speaking at a foreign ministers’ meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul, Erdogan urged countries with influence over Israel not to listen to its “poison” and to seek a solution to the fighting via dialogue without allowing a wider conflict.
He also called on Muslim countries to increase their efforts to impose punitive measures against Israel on the basis of international law and United Nations’ resolutions.
Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi earlier arrived in Istanbul on Saturday, Tasnim news agency reported, for a meeting with diplomats to discuss Tehran’s escalating conflict with Israel.
Around 40 diplomats were expected to join the weekend gathering of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), as Israel and Iran continue to exchange missile strikes.
“The Foreign Minister arrived in Istanbul this morning to participate in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation Foreign Ministers’ meeting,” Tasnim reported.
Araghchi met with his counterparts from Britain, France and Germany in Geneva on Friday.
“At this meeting, at the suggestion of Iran, the issue of the Zionist regime’s attack on our country will be specifically addressed,” said Araghchi, according to the news agency.
Israel began its assault in the early hours of June 13, saying Iran was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons, triggering an immediate retaliation from Tehran in the worst-ever confrontation between the two arch-rivals.
Earlier on Friday, Araghchi said Tehran was ready to “consider diplomacy” again only if Israel’s “aggression is stopped.”
The ministers are expected to release a statement following their meeting, the Turkish state news agency Anadolu said.
