Global Courant
STORY: “Where’s Mom!”
That was the cry an Iraqi man heard after finding his mother’s clothes on Wednesday (September 27), in the aftermath of a fire that ripped through a packed wedding hall in northern Iraq.
His wife said they escaped through the kitchen door when the room went up in flames.
When they got out, she realized her mother-in-law was missing.
‘We don’t know where she is. We only saw her clothes, we looked everywhere for her, we didn’t find anything in Mosul. We even looked for her among the burned people and found nothing, we only found her clothes.”
The fire killed more than 100 people and injured at least 150 others.
Firefighters searched the charred skeleton of the building in Qaraqoush until Wednesday morning and relatives gathered outside a mortuary in the nearby city of Mosul.
According to survivors, hundreds of people attended the wedding celebration after an earlier church service.
The fire started about an hour after the event when torches ignited a ceiling decoration as the bride and groom danced.
The Interior Ministry said it had issued four arrest warrants against the owners of the wedding hall, state media reported.
And President Abdul Latif Rashid has called for an investigation.
State media added that preliminary information indicated the building was made of highly flammable building materials, which contributed to its rapid collapse.
The town of Qaraqoush is largely Christian, but is also home to some members of Iraq’s Yazidi minority.
Most residents fled the city when Islamic State seized the city in 2014.
But they returned after the group was expelled in 2017.
