Turkish Officials Accused of Using Only 2% of Forest Protection Budget Before Wildfires

Turkish authorities battling the country’s worst ever wildfires have been accused of failing to prepare for the threat after official data showed they spent only a fraction of the modest funds budgeted to prevent forest fires this year.

Eight people have been killed in the fires which have swept through Turkey’s southwestern coastal regions, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people including tourists and briefly threatening to engulf a power plant.

President Tayyip Erdogan’s government has faced criticism that its response has been slow and inadequate – with opponents zeroing in on a lack of firefighting planes which forced Ankara to scramble to procure them from abroad.

(Additional reporting by Patricia Rua and Catarina Demony in Lisbon, Andrei Khalip in Madrid Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Dominic Evans and David Gregorio)