Civil defense shut nearly 2,500 Iraqi buildings this year over safety violations

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s Civil Defense Directorate has closed nearly 2,500 buildings for breaking public safety rules this year, and most have reopened after their owners fixed the violations, a directorate official said Tuesday.

Some of the buildings remain closed, and cases against owners who failed to fix the violations have been referred to the judiciary, Nawas Sabah, head of the directorate’s Relations and Media Department, told the state-run Iraqi News Agency.

Inspection committees regularly visit government, mixed public-private and private facilities to check that they meet safety standards, Sabah said. Teams enforce the Civil Defense Law, No. 44 of 2013, and the directorate is working with parliament to amend some of its provisions to strengthen legal oversight, he said. He did not say which provisions.

“These measures and inspection campaigns have contributed to a marked decline in the rates of incidents and fires,” Sabah said. He put the decline at 86% compared with previous years but did not say which years the comparison used.

The directorate is also completing a unified digital database of buildings in the governorates outside the Kurdistan Region, which has its own civil defense units, Sabah said. Each building will get an identification code holding its GPS location, type of activity, number of floors, emergency exits and firefighting systems, with their maintenance records.

The record will also hold earlier inspection findings and the locations of fire extinguishers, giving firefighters immediate access to a building’s details in an emergency, he said.

The directorate has reported closures on a larger scale before. Between January 2024 and August 2025, it closed 12,185 projects for safety violations, fined 5,192 others and referred 2,067 to criminal courts, according to a Federal Commission of Integrity report released in January.

Fires in commercial buildings, markets, fuel depots and warehouses are common in Iraq, and civil defense often cites electrical faults, flammable materials and safety violations as causes.

In September 2025, the directorate began a nationwide inspection campaign of multi-story residential complexes in Baghdad and other governorates to check construction permits and fire prevention systems.

That campaign followed the July 2025 fire at a shopping mall in Kut, Wasit governorate, which killed at least 61 people and set off a broad crackdown on safety enforcement. Days after the fire, the Interior Ministry said 610 commercial and industrial sites across Iraq had been shut for 10 days for violating civil defense rules. Later that month, authorities in Baghdad’s Rusafa area closed about 700 businesses in and around the Shorja market over fire safety violations.

Mohammed Jamil al-Mayahi, then Wasit’s governor, told Dijlah TV the fire had exposed critical weaknesses in Iraq’s emergency response and building safety enforcement, and called for a nationwide review of civil defense. Mayahi resigned soon after.

“If we wanted to close all buildings that do not meet safety requirements, we would have to shut down 90% of the shops in Wasit. These people would protest in the streets,” Mayahi said.