Algeria: after the deadly fires, damage estimate and supplies for the victims
Thousands of hectares of forest and crops destroyed, hundreds of houses destroyed, dozens of people without water and electricity: the material toll is high after fires ravaged northeastern Algeria, killing at least 34 people.
"We need help, all the help we can get, we need clothes, mattresses, things like that," a man we met at a resupply point in Bejaïa, 250 km from Algiers, the area worst affected by the fires that took three days to put out, told AFP.
Supplies and aid to the victims are beginning to be organised, while water and electricity are cut off. Psychological units have been set up. In Ait Oussalah, near the village of Toudja, 16 people - "10% of the inhabitants", according to witnesses - were burned alive as they tried to flee.
Every summer, the north and east of Algeria are hit by forest fires, a phenomenon that worsens every year as a result of climate change, which causes droughts and heat waves.
In August 2022, huge fires killed 37 people in the El Tarf region in the northeast. The summer of 2021 was the deadliest in decades: more than 90 people died in the north, mainly in Kabylia.
In the last few days, Tahar Chibane, 35, has lost most of his family in Ait Oussalah: "We have lost 99% of our land. There have been 16 dead, six of them from the Chibane family (his) and nine from the Zenoud family," he told AFP at a funeral in the village of Souk El-Dejemaâ on Wednesday.
"I cannot find the words to say the importance of a soul, the soul has no value, we are still standing, but how can we stay healthy when we have lost seven or eight family members at a time," Djoudi Zenoud, who also came to bury a relative, told AFP.
More than 1,500 people had to be evacuated from the many villages affected by the raging fires, which devastated everything in their path: scrub and cultivated fields, houses, shops, and even damaged seaside resorts.
"It's our life"
According to Interior Minister Brahim Merad, 140 fires have been recorded in 17 prefectures. In addition to the loss of human lives, the fires, concentrated mainly in the northeast, have "razed large tracts of forests, scrubland and fruit trees," the minister said, without giving figures.
Local authorities have been "instructed" to "start registering the damage and losses and take a census of those affected, in order to compensate them as soon as possible", he added.
Across the border in Tunisia, damage estimates have also begun to be made following the fires that mainly affected wooded areas in the northwest, near Tabarka, sparing most of the inhabited areas.
"The 14 fires in 7 regions have been brought under control. Between 10 and 20 houses have been damaged and there has been extensive destruction of forests, farmland and olive groves," civil protection spokesman Moez Triaa told AFP on Thursday, stressing that the losses would exceed the 2,000 hectares destroyed last year.
In 2019, a couple had opened an "ecolodge" in the forest above Tabarka, which burned to the ground. "For us, it's our life, the value is not the money, but our commitment," Adel Selmi told AFP.
In Algeria, at least three witnesses complained to AFP about delays in the rescue operation and a lack of resources.
"The local population played a crucial role in preventing the spread of certain outbreaks. We used plastic buckets filled from a volunteer's truck and climbed into the forest to fight the flames," said one of the volunteers, Mohammed Said Omal.