Uncontrolled Penjwen Fire Injures Volunteers, Officials Appeal for Urgent Aid
An uncontrolled fire in Penjwen has burned 1,000 donums and injured two volunteers, one critically. Officials appeal for aid as the blaze, hampered by landmines, nears villages.
ERBIL (Kurdistan24) – Officials in the Penjwen district have issued an urgent appeal for assistance as a major, uncontrolled fire continues to spread toward villages and residential areas, having already burned nearly a thousand donums of forest and vegetation and severely injuring two volunteer firefighters.
The blaze, which began on Thursday for unknown reasons, is being fought under perilous conditions due to the presence of landmines and unexploded ordnance in the border region.
In an exclusive statement to Kurdistan24 on Friday, Penjwen sub-district mayor Hemen Ibrahim confirmed the scale of the destruction and the human cost of the incident.
He stated that two individuals, identified as Bestun Abdullah and Alan Yusuf, were injured while fighting the flames and have been transported to hospitals in Sulaimani for treatment. Ibrahim added that Bestun Abdullah’s health condition is currently unstable.
Efforts to contain the blaze are ongoing, with civil defense teams and the forest and environmental police working alongside the Milekewe Organization for the Environment and a large number of local citizens who have joined the response as volunteers.
The Director of the Penjwen Forest Police, Sardar Ahmed, made a direct appeal through Kurdistan24, calling on citizens of the district to voluntarily go to the fire site to help teams try to control the flames in the border areas of Halalawa and Maso villages.
In a simultaneous plea to the government and other relevant authorities, Ahmed urged them to provide whatever is necessary to bring the fire under control as soon as possible. "The fire is spreading and approaching villages and residential areas," he warned, highlighting the escalating threat.
Compounding the difficulty of the firefighting efforts is the dangerous legacy of the Iran-Iraq war.
The Penjwen sub-district mayor explained that the presence of "many mines and explosives" in the area has made controlling the fire exceptionally difficult. He also noted that due to a separate helicopter crash incident in Sulaimani, officials had not requested aerial assistance teams to help combat the fire on Friday.
This incident comes less than two weeks after another devastating fire broke out on the night of August 17-18 in the villages of Chnar and Mordin in Halabja province.
That blaze resulted in the deaths of a 28-year-old man, Ari Mukhtar, and a police officer, while injuring two others.
The Halabja fire scorched approximately five thousand donums of vegetation, killed a large number of wild animals, and caused significant damage to six area villages, underscoring the severe danger posed by such fires in the region.
