According to early Wednesday reports, a fire that started at a wedding in the northern Iraqi town of Qaraqosh resulted in at least 100 fatalities and more than 150 injuries.
An AFP photographer observed ambulances arrive at the major hospital in the largely Christian town east of Mosul with their sirens blasting and hundreds of people lining up in the courtyard to give blood.
Others could be seen congregating in front of a refrigerated truck’s open doors that was carrying black body bags.
TRT World’s Hasan Abdullah reports from the scene of the wedding fire in Iraq’s Hamdaniya pic.twitter.com/TCnxNett30
— TRT World Now (@TRTWorldNow) September 27, 2023
According to a “preliminary tally” cited by Iraq’s official news agency, INA, health officials in the Nineveh province had “counted 100 dead and more than 150 injured in the fire at a marriage hall in Hamdaniyah”, as the town is also known.
Saif al-Badr, a spokesman for the health ministry, confirmed the death toll to AFP.
Badr added that there had been crowd crushes in the crowded reception hall and that the majority of the injured were being treated for burns or oxygen deprivation.
Although it claimed to have counted over 450 casualties, the Iraqi Red Crescent was unable to give a breakdown of how many were fatalities.
Prefabricated panels that were “highly flammable and violated safety standards” were found inside the event venue, according to a statement from civil defence authorities.
Because the panels contained plastic, the “release of toxic gases linked to the combustion of the panels” increased the risk.
According to the statement, “preliminary information” indicated that pyrotechnics were to blame for the blaze. “The fire caused some parts of the ceiling to fall due to the use of highly flammable, low-cost construction materials,” the statement stated.
As the bride and groom were “slow dancing,” the pyrotechnics “started to climb to the ceiling (and) the whole hall went up in flames,” according to wedding attendee Rania Waad, who received burns to her hand.
The 17-year-old choked back emotions as he stated, “We couldn’t see anything.” “We were drowning and had no idea how to escape.”
Early on Wednesday, it was seen that emergency personnel were searching through the event hall’s burned-out wreckage while assessing the area by torch.
Prime Minister Mohamed Shia al-Sudani urged the interior and health ministers to “mobilise all rescue efforts” to aid the fire victims in a brief statement.
The health ministry reported that “medical aid trucks” from Baghdad and other provinces had been sent to the region, and it also announced that its teams in Nineveh had been activated to provide care for the injured.
Iraq’s building industry frequently disregards safety norms, and the nation’s infrastructure is in ruin as a result of decades of conflict. As a result, tragic fires and accidents frequently occur there.
Over 60 individuals lost their lives in a fire that broke out at the Covid ward of a hospital in southern Iraq in July 2021.
Additionally, in April of the same year, an oxygen tank explosion at a hospital in Baghdad, which also served Covid patients, set off a fire that resulted in the deaths of over 80 individuals.
Following their entrance into the town in 2014, jihadists from the Islamic State organisation ravaged Qaraqosh along with many other Christian communities in the Nineveh Plains, northeast of Mosul.
After the group was driven out in 2017, Qaraqosh and its churches underwent a slow reconstruction. In March 2021, Pope Francis paid the area a visit.
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