At least 100 people were killed and 450 injured when a fire tore through a Christian wedding in northern Iraq.
Guests were celebrating at an event hall in the northern town of Qaraqosh, near Mosul, when the fire broke out on Tuesday evening. It is not known what started it but Rudaw, a Kurdish television news channel, broadcast video showing a “flare fountain” of fireworks shooting up from the floor and setting a chandelier alight.
Rania Waad, 17, a wedding guest who burnt her hand, said that as the bride and groom were slow-dancing “the fireworks started to climb to the ceiling and the whole hall went up in flames”. She added: “We couldn’t see anything. We were suffocating. We didn’t know how to get out.”
Another guest said: “The entire hall was on fire in seconds.”
The bride and groom, named only as Haneen and Revan, are believed to have escaped unharmed but were “devastated”, a guest told Alawla TV.
The preliminary death toll of 100 was confirmed by a health ministry spokesman but was later raised by other officials to 113, with warnings that it could rise. Some guests claimed there were as many as a thousand people in attendance.
Rania Waad, a 17-year-old guest at the wedding who sustained a burn to her hand, said that as the bride and groom “were slow-dancing, the fireworks started to climb to the ceiling [and] the whole hall went up in flames”. She added: “We couldn’t see anything. We were suffocating. We didn’t know how to get out.”
Iraq’s interior ministry said it had issued four arrest warrants for the owners of the wedding hall. The health ministry said most of the injuries were burns or the result of oxygen deprivation, adding that there had been a crush as people scrambled to flee the venue.
“The panels in the building were extremely flammable and released a toxic gas in a closed space,” the civil defence authorities said. “All of these factors combined caused this huge number of deaths and injuries.”
The Iraqi Red Crescent said it had counted upwards of 450 casualties. A spokesman for the health ministry said most of the injuries were burns or the result of oxygen deprivation, adding that there had been a crush as people scrambled to flee the hall.
“The majority of [the victims] were completely burnt and some others had 50 to 60 per cent of their bodies burnt,” Ahmed Dubardani, a local health official, told Rudaw. “This is not good at all. The majority of them were not in a good condition.”
“It’s been years since we’ve seen an accident of this scale, and never in a wedding hall,” Brigadier General Jawdat Abed Al Rahman, a spokesman for Nineveh’s civil defences, said. “There was an enormous amount of people in the hall, so there were crushes when the fire started.” Part of the building collapsed, he said, hampering the evacuations.
Emergency crews were seen sifting through the remains of the charred building on Wednesday in search of survivors. Little remained of the venue besides twisted metal and debris.
“The ecoband panels in the building were extremely flammable and released a toxic gas in a closed space,” the civil defence authorities said. “All of these factors combined caused this huge number of deaths and injuries.”
Relatives of the victims waited on Wednesday afternoon for officials to return the bodies of those who died in the blaze. One of them, Mariam Khedr, cried and hit herself as she waited for officials to return the bodies of her daughter, Rana Yakoub, 27, and three grandchildren, the youngest aged just eight months. “This was not a wedding. This was hell,” Khedr said.
Abdullah Ramadhan, commander of Nineveh operations, told Rudaw that the owner of the wedding hall had “fled” town and said officials were in contact with Kurdish authorities in Arbil to arrest him. Nine members of the venue’s administration have already been arrested, he said.
“The fire caused some parts of the ceiling to fall due to the use of highly flammable, low-cost construction materials,” the authorities added, with “preliminary information” suggesting fireworks were to blame for the blaze.
Firework or flare fountains, which shoot up from the ground, are only permitted to be used outside as a safety measure. Civil defence officials have reportedly said the wedding hall’s exterior was decorated with highly flammable cladding that is illegal in the country.
Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, the prime minister of Iraq, called on the health and interior ministers to “mobilise all rescue efforts” to help the victims of the blaze.
Decades of conflict have left Iraq’s infrastructure in disrepair, with safety standards in the country’s construction sector often disregarded, leading to fatal fires and accidents.
Like many Christian towns in the Nineveh Plains, Qaraqosh was ransacked by Islamic State jihadists when they entered the town in 2014. Since the group’s ousting in 2017, Qaraqosh and its churches have been slowly rebuilt.
In July 2021, a fire in the Covid unit of a hospital in southern Iraq killed more than 60 people. Two months before that, exploding oxygen tanks triggered a fire at another hospital in Baghdad dedicated to Covid patients that killed more than 80 people.
