By Bosphorus News Defense Desk
Residents in Sakarya province's Kaynarca district reported a suspicious object on Başoğlu beach to Türkiye's 112 emergency line on Saturday, prompting gendarmerie and Coast Guard units to secure the site. A bomb disposal team confirmed the object was the body section of a GERBERA-type unmanned aerial vehicle and contained no explosive material before removing it.
The find came within two days of two other suspected drone discoveries in northern Türkiye. A UAV washed ashore on the Yeniköy coast of Istanbul's Arnavutköy district and was taken to the Coast Guard Command for examination, while authorities in Düzce's Akçakoca district opened a judicial investigation after a suspected drone was found in a hazelnut orchard. The Düzce governor's office said there was no cause for public concern. Turkish officials assessed the Istanbul object as possibly a remnant of the Russia-Ukraine war, pending technical examination to confirm its origin.
GERBERA is a Russian-designed unmanned aerial vehicle introduced in 2024 as a lower-cost alternative to the Shahed-136 attack drone, known in Russian service as Geran-2. Built largely from plywood and foam, it is used both as a decoy to saturate Ukrainian air defenses and, in some variants, as an armed strike platform. A GERBERA washed ashore in Istanbul in July after apparently losing its way toward Ukraine and crashing into the Black Sea, the first confirmed identification of the type on Turkish soil. Gerbera drones have also violated Lithuanian airspace on at least two occasions in 2025, incidents that prompted NATO diplomatic protests.
The Sakarya, Istanbul and Düzce finds extend a pattern Bosphorus News has tracked since Turkish F-16s shot down an out-of-control drone approaching from the Black Sea in December 2025, the first in a cluster of incidents examined in a February report that also included a Russian-made Orlan-10 reconnaissance drone crashing near İzmit and a parachute-equipped Merlin-VR found in Balıkesir. Similar finds continued through the year: an armed drone crashed on a beach straddling the Bartın-Kastamonu provincial border in June, a second unidentified UAV turned up nearby on Çakraz Beach days later, and another military-grade drone came ashore in Zonguldak's Filyos district in July, days after a drone carrying roughly 5 kilograms of explosives went down in Trabzon. In March, a U.S.-made AEGIR-W unmanned surface vessel built by Sierra Nevada Corporation and still carrying an active warhead washed up near Ordu; Turkish naval explosive ordnance teams towed it offshore and destroyed it in a controlled detonation.
The pattern has also moved inland and into populated areas. An unidentified UAV crashed into a residential street in Samsun in May, damaging two buildings, while a Turkish-operated tanker was struck by a sea drone just 18 nautical miles from the Bosphorus entrance that same month, the closest such attack to the strait since the naval campaign began. The risk to Turkish-linked shipping has persisted into August, when a drone struck the Samsun-bound cargo ship Nadezhda near Russia's Novorossiysk port, seriously injuring three of its 22 crew members and extending a list of Turkish-linked vessels hit on Black Sea routes that includes the ATA 2, the Golden Leo and the MV Reyhan Sarı.
None of the incidents has been officially attributed to a deliberate strike on Turkish territory, and authorities have consistently described the objects as debris or malfunctioning systems that drifted or flew off course during Black Sea operations linked to the Russia-Ukraine war. But between drone wreckage washing ashore and commercial vessels taking direct hits, the Black Sea has become both a recovery zone and an active risk corridor for a conflict Türkiye is not a party to.
Sources: Nefes Gazetesi, Anadolu Agency, İHA, TASS, Bosphorus News review and reporting.