At least 12 newborn babies have died after a fire, apparently caused by an electrical fault, ripped through the maternity ward of a hospital in Baghdad.

Anguished parents gathered outside the Yarmouk hospital, in the west of the Iraqi capital, demanding answers from the government for the tragedy and searching for the remains of their children.

“When I got there I only found charred pieces of flesh,” said a 30-year-old father, Hussein Omar, describing the scene where his newborn twins had perished. “I want my baby boy and girl back. The government must give them back to me.”

Eshrak Ahmed Jaasar, 41, who was unable to find her four-day-old nephew, said: “We pay the hospital employees thousands of Iraqi dinars to allow us in to get our loved ones basic food and milk, which they cannot provide. It’s a corrupt government that doesn’t care about its citizens and lets this happen.”

Iraq’s health ministry said the fire began late on Tuesday, and initial investigations pointed to an electric fault being the cause of the blaze, which resulted in 12 deaths and the transfer of 29 women and seven children to nearby hospitals.

Other reports put the death toll at 13 newborns and said the women and children who escaped had suffered burns and smoke inhalation.

Electric fires are common in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East due to ailing infrastructure and corruption as well as poor construction and a lack of adherence to fire safety and building codes.

“My son’s birth was difficult,” one of the babies’ mothers said at the gate of the hospital, adding that she had not been given a chance to rescue her newborn. “I came with milk powder for him, and then this happened … they shut the electricity and the doors,” she said.

The 36-year old had spent more than a year visiting hospitals in and outside Iraq trying to conceive. “I waited for ages to have this baby and when I finally had him, it took only a second to lose him,” she said, holding a bunch of blackened documents with her hands, covered with burns.

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Firefighters reportedly took as long as three hours to put out the blaze, in an incident that is likely to raise further questions about corruption in the country, a central theme behind protests earlier this summer that condemned the failures of Iraq’s political class.

Those accusations, which were levelled by the families of the babies, will gain impetus after images apparently from inside the hospital emerged on social media showing profound neglect and disrepair, with cockroaches crawling out from between broken tiles, dustbins overflowing with rubbish, dirty toilets and patients lying on stretchers in the courtyard.

Parents condemned the government in interviews with reporters outside the hospital, describing a scene of chaos when the fire started, and blamed the authorities for a delayed response to the blaze.

In an interview with the New York Times, one mother, Mariam Thijeel, who gave birth to a son on Tuesday via caesarean section, described a scene of panic and chaos, and said an ambulance had not arrived until an hour and a half after the fire broke out.

“There was screaming,” she told the newspaper. “The power was cut off, and then the doors got locked on us, and there was no man in the newborn section, and we could not save any babies.”

Iraq is engaged in a battle against Islamic State, a conflict that has sapped the country of resources amid a global decline in oil prices. Many public facilities are underfunded and under-resourced.

Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.