The tragedy at Yarmouk maternity hospital in Baghdad took lives of at least 11 newborn babies, who were killed in a fire.
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This is even as 29 women and nine babies were injured when the fire broke out in a corridor of the maternity ward of al-Yarmouk hospital, which lies in central Baghdad.
It is not yet known what caused the blaze, but the ministry said it may have been due to an electrical fault.
“Some of the dead babies were preemies but not all of them”, said one of the doctors at the Yarmouk hospital, who spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to talk to reporters.
“My son’s birth was hard”, Shaima Hussein, one of the babies’ mothers, said at the gate of the hospital.
“He said he looked and couldn’t find them anywhere so he came back to Yarmouk”.
Another woman called Shaima Hassan was left in shock after losing her two-day-old son in the fire.
Authorities said that Iraqi buildings have poor maintenance and wiring, and the lack of fire escapes also contributes to the dangers. “The government must give them back to me”. The hospital staff then told him to go look at the morgue. The incident is likely to increase public anger over widespread corruption.
Pictures posted on social media showed the hospital in a state of neglect, with cockroaches crawling out from between broken tiles, dustbins overflowing with rubbish, dirty toilets and patients lying on stretchers in the courtyard.
Angry relatives gathered outside the hospital on Wednesday morning. The 36-year old had spent more than a year visiting hospitals in and outside Iraq trying to conceive.
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Corruption has exacerbated the effects on the economy of a sharp decline in oil revenue caused by falling crude prices and the costs of fighting Islamic State, the hardline group that has controlled large parts of northern and western Iraq since 2014.
