Flooding in Istanbul kills three and forces thousands to evacuate, officials say

Severe flooding driven by days of heavy rain killed three people in Istanbul and triggered large-scale rescue and evacuation operations, Turkish officials said.

Interior Minister Mustafa Çiftçi told reporters that one victim was electrocuted and two drowned, and he gave the running total of rescued people as 3,055. Çiftçi said those rescues were carried out by teams from the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), the Coast Guard, the gendarmerie and municipal employees, and he added that search operations were continuing for five people in Istanbul and one person in Kocaeli.

The flooding inundated streets, tunnels and underpasses across the city, forcing thousands to leave affected neighbourhoods, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Local authorities organised evacuations and emergency responses as crews worked to clear water and reach stranded residents; Report (via TRT Haber) relayed the Turkish interior minister's account of the casualty and rescue figures. Headlines from other outlets corroborated the scale of the rainfall and that people were missing after record downpours.

Officials attributed the disruption to continuous heavy rainfall over the preceding days that overwhelmed drainage and transport corridors, producing flash floods in low-lying urban areas and underpasses.

AFAD and other agencies were named as the primary operational responders; Çiftçi described the interagency mobilisation but did not provide a consolidated breakdown of where the rescued people were located across Istanbul's districts.

The toll reported by the interior minister included three confirmed deaths and a small number of people still unaccounted for; media accounts emphasised both the fatalities and the larger number of evacuees and rescued residents.

The reporting did not include independently verified casualty counts or a full inventory of damaged infrastructure, and local officials' statements formed the basis for the known figures.

Authorities continued search operations for the people listed as missing and maintained rescue deployments across the city while municipal teams worked to clear flooded tunnels and underpasses.

No source in this pack provided a comprehensive estimate of injured people or the economic cost of the damage, and none described longer-term displacement figures beyond the immediate rescues and evacuations.

The immediate priorities cited by officials were locating the remaining missing people, restoring safe access through key transport points such as tunnels and underpasses, and supporting those evacuated from flooded areas.

Media coverage flagged the exceptional intensity of the rainfall as the proximate cause but offered limited detail on infrastructure failures or specific neighbourhood-level damage in the material provided here.