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At least 12 babies killed in Baghdad hospital fire

A fire in Baghdad's Yarmouk maternity hospital has left at least 12 premature babies dead, Iraqi health ministry says.

    At least 12 babies killed in Baghdad hospital fire
    Burnt incubators stand outside a maternity ward after a fire broke out at Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad [Reuters/Thaier Al-Sudani]

    At least welve prematurely born babies were killed in a fire that broke out in the early hours of Wednesday on a maternity ward in a Baghdad hospital and was probably caused by an electrical fault, Iraqi authorities said.

    Eleven or twelve other babies and 29 women were rescued from the Yarmuk hospital's maternity ward and transferred to other hospitals, Hani al-Okabi, an MP who previouly managed a health directorate in Baghdad, told journalists after visiting the hospital and talking to the management.


    "My son's birth was difficult," Shaima Hussein, one of the babies' mothers, told Reuters news agency at the gate of the hospital. She said she was not given a chance to rescue her newborn.

    "I came with milk powder for him, and then this happened ... they shut the electricity and the doors," she said.

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    "I went to the other hospital, they are not there, so where are they?" he said.



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    "It was so dirty," he said. "We had to bring our own bed sheets."

    Thirteen years after the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, the oil-rich country still suffers a shortage of electricity, water, schools and hospitals.


    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 in Iraq and Syria (ISIL, also known as ISIS), the hardline group that has controlled large parts of northern and western Iraq since 2014.

    SOURCE: Reuters


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