Turkey Blocked a Probe After 10 Wildfire Crew Deaths

A wind shift on July 23, 2025 trapped 24 forestry workers and AKUT volunteers inside a Seyitgazi wildfire, killing 10 and sending 14 to hospital. Agriculture and Forestry Minister İbrahim Yumaklı said the flames turned on a crew that had been cutting a firebreak as the blaze jumped from Eskişehir toward Afyonkarahisar.

Nine months later the General Directorate of Forestry refused permission to investigate 36 officials whose names had been tied to that fire and to other deadly 2025 blazes. Relatives of tanker driver Tolunay Kocaman, 28, say an autopsy already showed he had gone in with no fire-resistant clothing.

Twenty-Four People Caught When the Wind Turned

Smoke rose about 8:30 a.m. on July 22, 2025 from woods between Büyükyayla and Fethiye in Seyitgazi, a rural district of Eskişehir. By the next afternoon the fire had pushed toward Sarıcaova in İhsaniye, and Yumaklı said 24 people, 19 forest workers and five AKUT members, were caught inside it when the wind snapped around.

The minister, speaking from the Fire Management Centre in Ankara, said 14 of them were being treated and that five forest workers and five AKUT volunteers were dead. He told the country that extraordinary heat and sharp wind shifts were still coming. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said the dead had fought to protect the forests at the cost of their lives.

Ercan Temel was on the lower slope and watched the group above him try to run.

They were fighting the fire above the hill, while we were fighting it at the bottom. They tried to escape the fire running uphill, but they couldn’t manage to do it.

Ercan Temel, firefighter on the lower slope, Seyitgazi

A middle-aged worker who did get out can be heard in a clip that moved around that night asking colleagues to pour water on him. “Save me. I’m burning,” he said, with flame at his back. Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç assigned prosecutors in Eskişehir and Afyonkarahisar the same evening. The cause of the ignition was not known.

Forestry Crews and AKUT Volunteers on the Same Line

The dead were not a city fire brigade. The forestry directorate said it buried five forestry staff and five volunteers from the Search and Rescue Association, known as AKUT, after a joint funeral round that ran from Karabük to Denizli and a ceremony at Ahmet Hamdi Akseki Mosque in Ankara.

THE CREW KILLED IN SEYITGAZI

Can had volunteered with AKUT for 15 years while working as a chief engineer on TUSAŞ’s HÜRJET jet trainer. Friends said he had pulled people from rubble in Hatay after the February 6, 2023 earthquakes. TUSAŞ posted his photograph with the aircraft and called him a colleague who had gone to help. Arslan’s father, Güler Arslan, said his son had spent years saving other people and could not save himself. Özcan, 22, had also worked quake relief.

AKUT said in a written statement that the five had been on duty in hard conditions to protect forests and human life, and that the loss was beyond words. Several of the forestry dead had been moved in from other provinces, which is how a Denizli crew ended up on an Eskişehir slope with Ankara volunteers.

What Did the Autopsy Find on Kocaman’s Body?

Kocaman had been on the job about a month. He married two weeks after he started, went on his honeymoon, and was sent to the fire when he came back. His father, Hüseyin Kocaman, said the young driver came home for old army boots because the ground was cooking his feet. “Baba, the ground is so hot, my feet are burning,” he told him. “Let me take these so they protect me a bit.”

His brother Serdar said photographs from earlier fires showed Tolunay in ordinary clothes, and that officials later claimed kit had been issued and not worn. On July 31, 2025, the forestry directorate said every person sent to fires had burn-resistant clothing. The family filed papers that point the other way.

The death-scene record and the Forensic Medicine Institute autopsy, as cited in the family’s April 2026 appeal, found no fire-resistant kit on Kocaman’s body. The administration told investigators that burn-resistant clothes had been handed out without signatures because the workload was heavy, then stored in five bags in a tanker cabinet that later burned. Crime-scene notes from the Afyonkarahisar prosecutor and the provincial gendarmerie’s criminal branch recorded that the tankers had burned completely and did not mention those five bags.

Yusuf Kurt, president of the Agriculture and Forestry Workers Union, Tarım Orman-İş, said untrained staff had been rotated onto the fire while experienced people were moved elsewhere, and that in-house training centres were being shut.

Fire has a language. If you cannot read it, you cannot control it. You need to listen to the wind, humidity, and topography. Identifying escape routes before engaging is critical.

Yusuf Kurt, president, Tarım Orman-İş

Doğan Kantarcı, a retired forestry professor at Istanbul University, said new hires were being put on the line too close to the start of the season and that crews no longer had enough people for three shifts. A forestry worker who asked not to be named told an interviewer he had not seen an oxygen mask that season and had not been given new uniforms. The United Agricultural and Forestry Workers Union, BTO-SEN, called the Seyitgazi deaths a massacre and said forest and rescue workers were treated as expendable.

YANGININ ORTASINDA 10 CANI YİTİRDİK: BU BİR KATLİAMDIR!
Eskişehir’in Seyitgazi ilçesinde çıkan orman yangınına müdahale eden ekiplerden 5 orman emekçisi ve 5 AKUT gönüllüsü, alevlerin arasında kalarak hayatını kaybetti.
Aynı yangında 14 kişi de yaralandı.
Orman yangınları her yıl… pic.twitter.com/iREpDCEq4b

— Birleşik Tarım Orman İşçileri Sendikası (@btosen2014) July 23, 2025

Mehmet Çak, the union’s leader, put it in one line: the cheapest life there is, is that of a worker. One of the two main wildfire schools, the Forest Workers Training Center at Dokuz Eylül University in Buca, İzmir, was closed in 2019. The Communications Directorate, which sits under the presidency, later said the training work was not hindered and that the site had been closed after an efficiency review.

The Ministry Blocked a Probe of 36 Officials

Prosecutors opened a file the night of the deaths. By autumn the file had moved, and the political fight had moved with it.

THE LEGAL FILE AFTER SEYITGAZI

1. July 23, 2025: Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç assigns prosecutors in Eskişehir and Afyonkarahisar as 10 bodies are taken toward Afyonkarahisar State Hospital.
2. October 6, 2025: The Afyonkarahisar Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office issues a decision not to prosecute. Families and local groups say witness statements were never taken in full.
3. Late October to November 2025: The no-prosecution order is withdrawn after public pressure and formal appeals, and the file is treated as open again.
4. November 25, 2025: Utku Çakırözer, the CHP member of parliament for Eskişehir, reads the 10 names in budget hearings and asks Yumaklı which manager had been called in to account for sending under-equipped people onto a hot slope.
5. April 27, 2026: The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, through the forestry directorate, refuses permission to investigate 36 central and regional officials from Eskişehir, Bursa, İzmir, Zonguldak, and Sakarya.

Çakırözer said the ministry’s refusal wounded both the families and the public, and that similar deaths would come again if no one was held to account. The Kocaman family’s appeal said a 790-page preliminary report and its annexes had not been served on them in full, which they argued cut into their right to reply. They listed a short crew, unused flight data, and survivors who were never heard.

The same refusal covered deadly 2025 fires in Bursa, İzmir, Zonguldak, and Sakarya, not only Seyitgazi. As of late April 2026, the families were waiting for Ankara’s regional administrative court to rule on that refusal. There had been no public ruling by early October 2026.

Turkey’s 2025 Fires Ranked Second Only to 2021

Seyitgazi sat inside a season that had already been running since June 26. Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said that between July 4 and July 22, 61 forest fires had started in 15 provinces and that 23 people had been detained. Yumaklı said seven fires were still burning on the day the 10 died. An older man and two forestry workers had already been killed near Ödemiş in İzmir, which put the year’s wildfire death count at 13. Four more deaths around Bursa, two of them volunteer tanker crew in a rollover, took it to 17 by July 28.

June alone had brought 612 forest fires. Heat from July 20 sat 6 to 12 degrees Celsius above seasonal norms, with readings over 40C. Those same weeks of heat and smoke prompted a travel warning for Turkey and Cyprus as ash hung over holiday roads.

Year-end forestry figures, released in 2026, put 2025 at 3,224 forest fires and 81,473 hectares burned. That is the second-largest burned forest area of the decade after 2021, when 139,503 hectares went. 2025 had fewer fires than 2024 (3,797) and almost three times the area.

OGM FOREST FIRE TALLY, 2020-2025

Europe’s satellite count sits on a different ruler. The Joint Research Centre’s 2025 fire season report, built from the European Forest Fire Information System, mapped 162,188 hectares of burned land in Türkiye across 1,391 fires of about 30 hectares or more. Across 46 countries the same system mapped 2,242,195 hectares, up 20 percent from 2024. The OGM number is a forest-service tally. The satellite number is scar mapping. They are not the same thing.

Yumaklı told parliament that the 2025 plan fielded 105 helicopters, 27 planes, and 14 drones, with 15,500 fire workers, 4,000 technical staff, 5,500 forest rangers, and 134,000 volunteers. After 2021’s 139,503-hectare disaster, that inventory was the state’s answer. It did not keep 24 people from being caught on a Seyitgazi hill when the wind turned.

In May 2026, with that season in mind, Ankara banned entry to forests from June 1 through September 30, except in listed parks, and barred camping and open fires outside licensed sites. Visiting hours in those parks were set from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Ten Thousand Saplings for One Month on the Job

What the state did complete was planting. Eskişehir’s regional forestry directorate took families to the burn in November 2025 and put trees in their relatives’ names.

MEMORIAL FORESTS PLANTED IN 2025

• Tolunay Kocaman: A memorial wood at Kümbet, with 10,000 saplings in Kumbet on the ground where the tanker driver had lived.
• Tekin Enes Sarıyıldız: 5,000 saplings at Fethiye, on the line the fire first ate.
• Eyüp Dereli: 15,000 saplings at Eğriöz in Tepebaşı, planted with the dozer operator’s family.

The wider Seyitgazi replant, still running in 2026, is meant to mix 53 percent pine and juniper with 47 percent broadleaf trees such as maple, ash, oak, and wild apple, plus almond and black-pine seed on ground that machines cannot work. The law says a burned forest must be restocked within a year. Regional deputy director İsmet Kıraç told the Kümbet crowd that each seedling would keep Kocaman’s name in the soil.

The trees are in. The 36 names are not in a courtroom. Kocaman’s family is still asking a court in Ankara to force the ministry to let a prosecutor look at the officials who sent a one-month tanker driver onto a slope in army boots.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where Were the 10 Seyitgazi Wildfire Victims Buried?

Enes Kızılyer was buried in Karabük, Tolunay Kocaman in Kümbet village in Seyitgazi, Eyüp Dereli in Odunpazarı in Eskişehir, and Hilmi Şahin and Sercan Ütni in Beyağaç in Denizli. The five AKUT volunteers had a joint funeral at Ahmet Hamdi Akseki Mosque in Ankara, after which Alperen Özcan was taken to Kuşçu village in Polatlı, Bayram Eren Arslan to Ortaköy Cemetery in Mamak, and İlker Onarıcı and Tekin Enes Sarıyıldız to Karşıyaka Cemetery, while Muharrem Can was buried the next day in Konya.

Why Is Europe’s Burned-Area Figure for Turkey Higher Than OGM’s?

OGM counts forest fires in its own ledgers and recorded 81,473 hectares for 2025. EFFIS maps burn scars from satellites and, for fires of about 30 hectares or more, logged 162,188 hectares in Türkiye that year, a figure that can include scrub, farmland, and other land cover inside the scar, which is why the two numbers should not be averaged or treated as a correction of each other.

What Forest Rules Did Ankara Set for the 2026 Fire Season?

The Ankara Governor’s Office closed ordinary entry to forested land from June 1 through September 30, 2026, with listed national parks, recreation areas, nature parks, and forest parks excepted, banned tents outside licensed camps, and allowed fires and samovars only in marked spots inside those parks between 9 a.m. and 10 p.m.

What Trees Are Going Back Into the Seyitgazi Burn?

The forestry project for the Fethiye slopes specifies that 53 percent of the plantings are needle-leaf species, pine and juniper, and 47 percent are broadleaf species including mahaleb, ash, maple, wild pear, hawthorn, black locust, cornelian cherry, wild apple, mountain medlar, and oak, with almond and black-pine seed sown where machines cannot till.

Did Investigators Name a Cause for the Seyitgazi Fire?

Yumaklı said on July 23, 2025 that the cause was not yet known, and no later official finding of ignition has been published in the case papers families have cited; nationally, OGM recorded 1,012 forest fires in 2025 with no determined cause, covering 37,626 hectares, alongside 160 fires classed as intentional.