The bride and groom had just swept onto the dance floor — her dress billowing around her — for the traditional “slow dance” while people lit flares to add excitement to the romantic moment. But the flames shot upward, igniting the decorations draped over the chandeliers and hung from the ceiling, turning a night of celebration into a time of mourning.
Fragments of the flaming decorations dropped onto tables and wedding guests. By the time the fire was out, about 100 people were dead and 150 others were injured, suffering from severe burns or smoke inhalation. Early counts estimated that almost a quarter of the guests were either dead or hurt.
The fire broke out on Tuesday night in the Al Haithem wedding hall near the village of Qaraqosh, in Hamdaniya, about 20 miles southeast of Mosul. Christians have lived in the area, known as the Nineveh Plain, for nearly 2,000 years, but many fled the Islamic State in 2014. Only in the last several years have they begun to return and raise families again in these small villages, local officials said.
The toll of those killed and injured was so high, witnesses suggested, because at the moment the blaze began, the lights went out. The guests were unable to see, and stumbled and fell as they rushed toward the main entrance of the wedding hall, said Nabil Ibrahim, a guest.
When the decorations, which he described as “feather-like things,” burst into flames, he said, “it was like gas being poured on the fire.”
The decorations “started falling on people like a volcano, and shortly after the power went off,” he said.
“Some people fell under the chairs, and they couldn’t get out,” he said. “The only way out was the front door, which is a small door — like one meter and half across — and nobody knows about the door of the kitchen.”
That was the door he escaped through, helping others out as well, he said. He knew about the kitchen exit only because his son had been married in the same wedding hall.
Another guest, Gorges Yohana, said the fire had moved with astonishing speed. The roof caught fire within seconds, he said.
“I helped, like, seven or eight people, but I couldn’t help more because I was choking from the smoke and my eyes were stinging and streaming,” he said.
At some point during the smoke and confusion, the bride and groom were able to escape, relatives said.
Weddings in Iraq are often large and expensive celebrations even for those of modest means, and regardless of whether the families are Muslim or Christian. This wedding was no exception.
As the fire intensified, a bulldozer was used to knock openings in the wall in an attempt to allow people to escape, witnesses said. But the ensuing influx of oxygen may have fed the flames, which then seemed to engulf the entire building and sent smoke billowing into the air, as numerous photos and videos on social media indicated.
Firefighters rushed to the scene, but some onlookers said their hoses had not seemed to work immediately.
The district’s mayor, Issam Behnam, said scores of people from Hamdaniya alone had died, including some of his own relatives.
Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani of Iraq on Wednesday called for an investigation into the cause of the fire, and, among other steps, ordered the civil defense force to undertake “intensified periodic inspections” of malls, restaurants, event halls and hotels.
On Wednesday evening, the Kurdish regional government detained the wedding hall’s owner, identified by the Kurdistan Region Security Council as Samir Sulaiman, of Erbil, the Kurdish capital. The government handed him over to the Interior Ministry based on findings by the Investigation Court in Mosul, after an inquiry at the scene. The court found that the fire started at 11:30 on Tuesday night, and that while it was started by the flares, the blaze was exacerbated by and raced through the hall because of the “highly flammable fabrics, which caused the ceiling to catch fire.”
The Nineveh Governorate’s civil defense force noted, in its own report released Wednesday evening, that “the wedding hall was covered with highly flammable Ecobond panels in violation of safety instructions,” and lacked a sprinkler system.
The fire hit especially hard in the small Christian communities that dot northern Iraq, said several Christian priests who were attending funerals or performing them in the aftermath of the tragedy. Their communities, some of the most ancient in the Christian world — Syriac Catholic, Syrian Orthodox, Chaldean and Assyrian Church of the East, among others — have been decimated over the 20 years since the American invasion, shrinking to fewer than 400,000 Christians today from some 1.5 million.
Many Christians left after attacks by Al Qaeda and by Shiite extremists, but the Christian villages of the Nineveh Plain hung on — until the invasion by the Islamic State in 2014, said Father Charbel Isso, a Syriac Catholic priest in Qaraqosh, where the fire took place.
The Islamic State forced out almost all the Christians. They began to return only after 2017, when the Islamic State was driven out of Mosul. Christians returned slowly in part because Muslims who had fought the Islamic State had taken up residence, sometimes moving into Christian homes, and many no longer felt safe or welcome. The visit by Pope Francis in 2021 boosted their confidence, especially in Mosul and the Nineveh Plain.
“All of us were refugees in Kurdistan, and when we returned, we found all of our things and properties either looted or burned,” Father Isso said.
“Even during ISIS,” he said, “we didn’t lose victims as we did” in this fire.
He spoke as he was helping to prepare the bodies of the burned for burial. Two cousins on his father’s side died in the fire, he said. He planned to attend and deliver prayers at the funerals of 50 of his friends and neighbors on Thursday morning.
On Wednesday morning, as people picked through burned mobile phones, stray high-heeled shoes and charred furniture, there was a sense of disbelief and both the longing and fear of finding a memento of a loved one — a piece of jewelry or a half-burned identification document.
Father Isso seemed to be searching for an explanation for the losses, but said he could not get the faces of those he knew out of his mind.
“The features of a burned person are changed, they become like sand or ash,” he said, adding, “This is the kind of disaster one finds it difficult to accept.”
Falih Hassan contributed reporting from Baghdad; Sangar Khaleel from Qaraqosh, Iraq; and Ala Mahsoob from Hamdaniya, Iraq.
