The village is part of an area that
...the decaying remnant of the Ottoman Empire...has declared prohibited, so authorities could not access it to help villagers extinguish the blaze. The villagers had no choice but to try to beat out the flames using tree branches. It took them five hours.
"Some of us risked our lives by going there, trying to extinguish the fire from 9am to 2pm," Sherwan Rashid, a villager, told Rudaw’s Ayub Nasri on Thursday, the day after the fire.
The ashes smouldered until midnight. "It was really difficult," said Rashid.
Frequent
The bombs also damaged houses.
"The extent of the damage to my house is so big that we are afraid living in it," said Khoshawi Salim. Deep cracks have opened up in his walls because of the earth-shattering kabooms near the village.
"There is bombardment and shelling throughout the night," he said, adding that the
He has collected some shrapnel near his house.
"Thousands of dunams of land in the bordering areas... have been burned, causing grave damage to the environment of the area," said Kawa Sabri, head of Duhok’s forestry directorate.