Fire at a hypermarket in Iraq leaves over 60 dead

Baghdad.- A fire broke out last night in a hypermarket that was inaugurated just a week ago in the city of Kut, capital of the province of Wasit, southeast of Baghdad, caused more than 60 deaths in a new tragedy in Iraq whose causes are still unknown. The official Iraqi news agency INA, citing unidentified health sources, raised the death toll to 63 on Thursday, while 40 others were injured. The Civil Defense teams spent the whole night fighting the flames in the five-story building until they were completely extinguished this morning, a few hours in which, according to videos published by the province of Wasit on its official Facebook account, the people who were able to escape were crowded in the attic waiting to be rescued.

“Suffocated in the bathrooms”

The Iraqi Interior Minister, Abdulamir al Shammari, said in a statement that the building where the fire occurred, which had only been open for seven days, has five floors and housed a restaurant and a hypermarket. The official indicated that the majority of the deceased “suffocated in the bathrooms due to the dense smoke”, while fourteen bodies were found “charred”. He also praised the work of the Civil Defense teams, who managed to “rescue more than 45 people trapped inside the building”. Precisely a source from Civil Defense, cited by INA, affirmed this morning that the fire in the hypermarket was “completely extinguished”. “The teams have begun the search for missing persons inside the commercial building,” he asserted, so it is not ruled out that the number of victims may increase.

Three days of mourning and exhaustive investigation

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani ordered this Thursday an “immediate” investigation into the causes of the deadly fire and that work be done “exhaustively to discover any deficiencies and take all the strict measures necessary to prevent similar incidents from happening again,” according to a statement from his office.

In addition, the Council of Ministers declared three days of official mourning in solidarity with the victims’ families.

While the Interior Minister said that “the results of the exhaustive technical investigations will be announced immediately after their completion”, without giving a date, to discover “the true causes of the fire”, the governor of Wasit, Mohamed Yamil al Mayah, said that they will publish the results of the “preliminary investigation in 48 hours”. Al Mayah has filed “official lawsuits against the building owner, the mall owner, and anyone who has been shown to have been involved or negligent in this serious incident.”

A History of Deadly Fires

In Iraq, fires in facilities are common, especially with the rise in summer temperatures and due to lack of maintenance and the poor state of the infrastructure of a country that is still in the process of reconstruction after decades of war and sectarian violence. In fact, there have been similar fatal incidents in recent years, often attributed to poor safety measures and electrical short circuits.

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One of the deadliest fires still remaining in the image of Iraq occurred at the end of September 2023, when 114 people died and more than 200 were injured by a fire in the hall where a wedding was being celebrated in the province of Nineveh, in northern Iraq.

But other tragedies have also taken place in hospitals themselves. On July 13, 2021, a fire broke out in the covid-19 ward of Al Hussein University Hospital, located in the southern city of Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq. According to health authorities, the incident caused the death of 92 people and injured another 110. This was the second hospital fire in Iraq in three months, since in April of that same year, a fire in a Baghdad hospital caused the death of 82 people and injuries to another 110.