ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — More than two days after a massive fire ripped through Baghdad’s Ibn al-Khatib hospital, Murtadha al-Musawy is still looking for three of his relatives. He fears they are among the estimated 130 people who have died since the blaze broke out at the coronavirus hospital on Saturday night.
Murtadha’s heart began to pound when he heard news of the fire. His cousin Wafaa had been caring for her sick husband Mohammed at the facility, who was experiencing complications from the virus, for a week. Officially, visitors are banned from hospitals due to the pandemic, but Iraq’s healthcare facilities are so understaffed that they rely on distressed relatives to care for patients. Wafaa, an exhausted mother of six, needed help to look after her husband, so Dhiaa, her brother-in-law, made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Diwaniyah.
As news came in that dead bodies were being transported to nearby hospitals, Murtadha and his relatives split up to find out what happened to Mohammed. Murtadha got into his car and drove as fast as he could from al-Kindi hospital, at best a 35-minute drive away. Murtadha’s brother went to Sheikh Zayed hospital, while his cousin went to the scene of the incident.
Murtadha rushed through al-Kindi hospital, stepping over the injured and dead splayed on the floor. He searched the faces of burned bodies, hoping desperately that his loved ones were not among them.
"People around me were screaming and running. I could not believe the scene," Murtadha told Rudaw English by phone on Sunday.
After hours of fruitless searching, the three turned to their last option: the morgue at the Iraqi capital’s Medical City.
"It was a tragic situation,” said Murtadha of the scene. “Lots of people had gathered in front of the morgue’s refrigerators, asking the doctors to allow them to enter … the person in charge had already photographed the bodies on his phone and began showing people the images."
The three men did not see their relatives, so the doctors offered to take DNA samples to match against the 26 bodies still unidentified at the facility. Though promised results by Thursday, Murtadha has little hope that the authorities will deliver.
The tragedy has reignited anger across Iraq. Anti-government chants rang out at protests across several Iraqi cities on Sunday evening, demanding the dismissal of health minister Hassan al-Tamimi, who was then suspended.
Murtadha, 43, was a photographer for the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF, or al-Hashd al-Shaabi) during the war with the Islamic State (ISIS). His body still bears scars from the injuries he sustained on the job.
"We fought to feel safe, but we were never safe in this country,” Murtadha said. “The hospital is not safe, the street is not safe, we are still threatened by death every day."
“Dhiaa’s wife is pregnant, and he is the only provider for her and his mother. I don’t know what guilt this child has for being born without a father,” he said, noting that the couple had only gotten married four months ago.
A report released following a fact-finding mission by the government-funded Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights (IHCHR) found that the fire started after an oxygen cylinder exploded in a patient wing crowded with visitors. The commission said that the crowd allowed to wait in the wing is evidence of the hospital’s failure to abide by the instructions from the Ministry of Health.
Footage shared on social media shows some visitors using an electric cooker to cook food inside the hospital’s isolation halls. Murtadha said he visited the hospital a week ago, and saw people cooking food inside the hospital using gas bottles.
Fire extinguishing equipment at the hospital was not used because people did not know where it was being stored, the IHCHR mission found. Many patients were rescued by companions and family members, because the civil defense teams meant to rescue those trapped arrived late to the scene. The IHCHR also found that the hospital had an insufficient number of specialized, trained night staff to monitor emergency cases in the hospital.
That safety conditions at Iraq’s hospitals are insufficient is far from new knowledge. A 2017 report by the Federal Board of Supreme Audit found that hospitals lacked safety equipment, including hoses and self-extinguishing sensors.
Murtadha recalled the deadly explosion that happened in central Baghdad, Karrada district in 2016, in which at least 292 people died from car bombing as a number of markets and malls near the site of the explosion burned. The buildings lacked safety standards, as there were no emergency exits or equipment to extinguish the fire, according to the AP news agency.
"The screams of people in the hospital were loud for a few minutes, then there was silence and everything ended, everyone became charred corpses, and some jumped out of the windows, exactly as what happened in the Karrada explosion," Murtadha recalled his cousin as telling him of the scene.
Questions whirl in Murtadha’s mind, keeping him awake at night. There is no rest for those who cannot bury their dead, he said.
“What does the resignation of the Minister of Health mean? Will that compensate for the blood?"
