4 premature babies died in hospital fire in Iraq

A fire erupted at a women’s and children’s hospital in the southern Iraqi city of Diwaniyah, resulting in the tragic loss of four children’s lives and leaving over 20 others suffering from suffocation, according to an Interior Ministry source. 

Minister of Health Salih al-Hasnawi told the Iraqi news agency that “at the direction of the Prime Minister, we went to the scene of the Diwaniyah Hospital fire.

“The incident resulted in the death of 4 children as a result of asphyxiation,” he said, adding that “investigative committees have been set up and will now proceed on the basis of the Prime Minister’s directives to find out the causes of the fire.”

According to Al-Hasnawi, although the hospital facility itself was not ablaze, it became inundated with smoke.