THE Philippine embassy in Iraq said the 13 Filipino who were killed in the capitol hotel fire in Erbil, Iraq have been identified and the government is now in the process of informing their loved ones.
Embassy officials said the victims, all females, were suffocated by the smoke while trying to find their way out in the darkness.
There are some 1,000 Filipinos in Kurdistan, mostly hotel and restaurant workers, with some engineers and nurses.
The Kurdistan region in north Iraq has largely been spared the deadly violence that plagues other parts of the country.
The region is frequently visited by tourists from other areas of Iraq and various countries in the region.
In 2012, the Philippine government lifted a ban on the deployment of Filipino workers to Kurdistan amid growing foreign labor demand, but the ban remains enforced in other parts of war-torn Iraq. (Eagle News Service)