As video footage of the blaze spread across social media,Iraq’s health ministry issued no statement and did not respond to phone calls for comment.
Iraq’s Prime Minister,Mustafa al-Kadhimi,issued a statement early on Sunday calling for an investigation into the cause of the fire.
Iraq’s health system was on its knees before the coronavirus pandemic began,gutted by decades of corruption,mismanagement and underfunding. In interviews Saturday,doctors described remarkable pressures:Some said they had faced pressure to return to work in their understaffed wards,despite a positive coronavirus diagnosis;several said that they had feared for patients they treated in rundown wards where electricity cables visibly sparked from the ceiling.
In the hours after the blaze,it was unclear how the fire began.
A doctor in the hospital who spoke on the condition of anonymity,fearing reprisals from his employer,said that oxygen canisters were stored haphazardly,with little apparent concern for safety. Describing the scene in the intensive care unit early Sunday,the doctor said the walls were “black as coal.”
“I can’t imagine the misery people suffered here,” the doctor said. “They couldn’t breathe without machines,and yet the fire came to them.”
A spokesman for Iraq’s civil defence force,Maj. Gen. Kadhim Bohan,said that the dead were mostly older people on ventilators.