NEWS BRIEF An electrical fire is being blamed for the deaths Wednesday of at least 11 babies at a maternity ward in Baghdad.
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“After a fire broke out at one of the maternity wards at the Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad, an oxygen capsule detonated and as a result the babies got burned and died”, the health ministry said in a statement.
In the early morning hours of Wednesday [August 10], 12 pre-term infants were tragically killed in a blaze Iraqi Civil Defense says was accidentally started due to an electric short circuit.
“Twenty-nine women patients who were in the same ward were evacuated to other hospitals”, he said.
They were all transferred to other hospitals in Baghdad.
“I only found charred pieces of flesh”, Mr Omar said.
The authorities were criticised in the aftermath of an attack in the Karrada district of Baghdad last month that killed at least 323 people.
“Nearby, Shaima Hassan stood dazed and trembling in shock after losing her two-day-old son”. ‘I want my baby boy and girl back.
“Some of the dead babies were preemies but not all of them”, said one of the doctors at the Yarmouk hospital. She is 36 and had spent the past year trying to conceive. The government must give them back to me’.
“I am looking for our child, they told me “go find him in the fridge”, said the middle-aged woman.
“We pay the hospital employees thousands of Iraqi dinars to allow us in to get our loved ones basic food and milk, which they can not provide”, Jasaar said.
Electric fires are not unusual in Iraq because of inferior wiring and shoddy care, and the risk is frequently added to by too little fire escapes.
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Graft 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 militant group that has controlled large parts of northern and western Iraq since 2014.
