Seven killed in arms depot explosion in Najaf
Billows of smoke following an explosion. Photo: Al-Arabiya news
Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) – Local Iraqi sources reported on Monday that seven people were killed in an explosion of a weapons depot in Najaf city in central Iraq, about 160 kilometers south of Baghdad.
A security source reported that an explosion took place in a weapons depot in the Al-Hawli area in Najaf.
“A weapons depot on the Al-Hawli road in Najaf exploded, but the number of casualties is unknown,” the source told the Iraqi News Agency (INA).
Sources suggest that the warehouse belongs to one of the factions of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), and that the explosion may have been caused by high temperatures and poor storage, as in similar incidents in the past years.
Iraqi weapons depots spread remarkably within residential areas after 2003. With the beginning of each summer, people start to fear possible explosion of these depots because of the high temperatures that turn them into time bombs that may take their lives.
Between the summers of 2016 and 2018, Iraq witnessed the explosion of three weapons depots in southern and eastern parts of the capital Baghdad.
The last of which was the explosion of a warehouse inside Sadr City, a suburb district of the city of Baghdad, killing ten people, wounding 90 others, damaging private and public properties, and destroying an elementary school close to the scene of the explosion.
In 2019, five Iraqi weapons warehouses exploded in different parts of the country, as well as in the summer of 2020.
In July 2021, a weapons depot belonging to the Imam Ali Division of the PMF exploded in Najaf governorate.