A mother and her two children died when the roof of their house in Iraq collapsed after a night of torrential rain, the civil defense service announced today.

The 26-year-old mother and her two children aged 4 and 2 were killed by “the collapse of the roof of their house” in a small village in the region of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, according to the head of the local civil protection service Fadel Mohammed, who clarified that “the tragedy is due to the heavy rains”.

Iraq has been facing three consecutive years of drought and the rare torrential rains, which are lifesaving for rivers and reservoirs, are greeted with relief by farmers.

However, they also occasionally cause longer-than-usual power outages and flooding in cities with faulty infrastructure.

Therefore, due to the rainfall, Diyala Province, in central Iraqdeclared a one-day holiday for civil servants, and Salahuddin province in northern Iraq announced the closure of schools, according to statements from their governors.

Immigration and Displaced Persons Minister Evan Gabbro asked her teams to provide “support and assistance to displaced persons living in camps” whose tents were damaged by the rain, according to a statement.

Iraq, a country with large hydrocarbon deposits, is one of five countries in the world most vulnerable to some of the effects of climate change, according to the UN.

Almost a third of its 42 million people live in poverty and its rural communities are at the forefront of the effects of climate change and water shortages affecting livestock and crops.

At the end of February, the two major rivers that flow through Iraq, the Tigris and the Euphrates, saw a large drop in their water levels in the southern part of the country, according to authorities.

The government shows this phenomenon in the reduction of rainfall, but mainly in the dams that have been built against the current of the two rivers and hold the water in neighboring Turkey and Iran.