Fire breaks out in a Najaf hospital 

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – A fire broke out in a public hospital in the southern Iraqi province of Najaf on Thursday, damaging part of the facility, Iraqi state media reported. 

The incident took place at al-Haydariya General Hospital, located 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the center of the shrine city, reported the state-owned Iraqi News Agency.

Quickly extinguished by the province’s firefighters, the fire only caused material damage to the medical center and no casualties. 

In April and July of 2021, two infernos at COVID-19 isolation wards in Baghdad and Nasiriyah killed a total of 174 people and injured 210. 

The then-Health Minister Hassan al-Tamimi, along with the Ibn al-Khatib Hospital officials and firefighting authorities in the area, resigned after the April inferno, which claimed the lives of 130 Iraqis, following a government probe.

Decades of maladministration, sanctions, and corruption have riddled Iraq’s healthcare system, which was held in high esteem in the region in the past. 

“Iraq’s hospital fires were not flukes; corruption makes such incidents inevitable,” a recent paper by the German political foundation of Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) argued in December 2021.