#breaking #erbil the earth quake felt across #iraq pic.twitter.com/NxqwMu67zT
— Steven nabil (@thestevennabil) 12 November 2017
A powerful earthquake hit the northern border region between Iran and Iraq on November 12, killing more than 348 people in Iran and seven in Iraq, and injuring thousands more. According to Iran’s state-run Irna news agency 5,953 people were injured.
The hardest hit province was Kermanshah. More than 236 people died in the town of Sarpol-e Zahab, about 10 miles from the Iraq border.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, offered his condolences and urged government agencies to do all they could to help those affected. Iranian police and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were dispatched to affected areas overnight.
On the Iraqi side, the most extensive damage was in the town of Darbandikhan, 47 miles east of the city of Sulaimaniya in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region. More than 30 people were injured in the town, according to the Kurdish health minister, Rekawt Hama Rasheed.
The quake killed at least seven people in Iraq and injured 535, all in the country’s northern, semi-autonomous Kurdish region, the interior ministry said.
The magnitude-7.3 quake was centred 19 miles outside the eastern Iraqi city of Halabja. It struck at a depth of 14.4 miles (23.2km), a shallow depth that can have broader damage. Magnitude-7 earthquakes on their own are capable of widespread, heavy damage.
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Don’t you find it strange that the Kurds in both Iraq and Iran suffer an Earthquake now ?.
I always say; God works in mysterious ways.
Innocent people died in this earthquake. Just because they were Kurds doesn’t mean they were bad. RIP to the victims.
When are we going to learn from our mistakes and from the more experienced countries, I don’t know. The government is between a hammer an an anvil too, in addition to it’s own mistakes or laziness. If they pressure people to make the buildings safe, people whine: “they make us pay more”. If it doesn’t act firmly and a quake hit, people see them as responsible. The exact same thing happened in Plasco building in Tehran. Authorities warned them several times about the flammables, a couple of times closed the place due to safety concerns, Plasco owners and tenants protested furiously and force the authorities to re-open. Well it burned to the ground and a lot of firefighters died, now they say authorities are responsible because “they didn’t force us enough to make it safe”.
If something like that happened in a more populous area the death toll will be unthinkable. It seems these days we have to pay our condolences on a daily basis.
Condolences to the affected. Rest in peace the dead, in both countries.