Erbil floods kill 2 as muddy river shuts city’s drinking water plants

ERBIL — Saturday evening’s floods in Erbil killed a 5-year-old child and a loader driver who had gone out to help residents, and on Sunday muddy river water forced the city’s drinking water plants to shut down.

The child drowned in their father’s car in the New Erbil neighborhood, and the body was found several hours later. In the Sebardan neighborhood, the driver of a front-end loader drowned after going to residents’ aid. Erbil Governor Omed Khoshnaw confirmed both deaths on Sunday.

Khoshnaw had said late Saturday that the driver, 25, had volunteered his own loader to work alongside the rescue teams. The child’s father got out of the car, he said then, but the child was missing.

The Erbil Water Directorate said Sunday that it had temporarily stopped every treatment plant that supplies the city’s drinking water: Ifraz 1, 2 and 3 and the emergency plant. Heavy rain had pushed the river water’s turbidity, a measure of how cloudy it is, to 12,400 nephelometric turbidity units, beyond what the plants can treat. The directorate said it halted them to protect residents’ health.

Water will keep reaching homes from stored reservoir supplies for the next few hours, the directorate said. The plants will restart and supply will return to normal once turbidity falls, it said, but it did not say when. The Ifraz plants draw from the Great Zab River.

Hundreds of cars and homes were damaged across Erbil, 964media correspondents reported. Outlying neighborhoods flooded, and water also pooled in the city’s market area, in the Sheikh Ahmed and Setaqan neighborhoods, on Koya Road and around Rizgary Hospital.

Civil defense, emergency and municipal service teams arrived quickly but could not keep up with rain that came with hail and strong winds. Water poured into businesses and shops and ruined most of their goods.

Sheikh Ahmed was among the hardest-hit neighborhoods. Water collected in its cemetery, which lies on flat ground, and most of the graves were flooded and damaged, a 964media correspondent reported.

By Sunday morning, mud and silt were still blocking some of the city’s roads. A 964media correspondent who drove the 100-Meter Road and the 60-Meter Road said both were open and traffic was moving normally.

Water was still standing at the bridge near Rizgary Hospital that leads to Koya Road, though cars were gradually reappearing there. Near Family Mall and on Shaqlawa Road, several cars abandoned during the flood on Saturday night were still where they had been left, and no one had come for them.

Khoshnaw had already declared Sunday an official holiday at every educational institution, from kindergartens to universities, after rain from Friday night into Saturday flooded homes, markets and streets in Erbil and Kirkuk. Outside Erbil, four members of one family were killed Saturday in a crash on a rain-slicked road near Rashad, on the highway between Kirkuk and Salah al-Din, and lightning killed a livestock trader in Zakho.

Floods in December 2025 killed five people in the Kurdistan Region and Kirkuk, two of them in Chamchamal district.

The Iraqi Meteorological Organization and Seismology forecast light to moderate showers in the north on Sunday, heavy in places with thunder and lightning, and light showers in limited parts of the center and south. It warned of dense fog early in the day in parts of the center and north, cutting visibility below 1 kilometer. On Saturday it said relatively stable, clear weather would follow from Monday.