BAGHDAD (Al Jazeera) – The death toll from a gas cylinder explosion in a residential area of the northern Iraqi city of Sulaimaniyah has risen to 15. The explosion, which caused a house to collapse, also left 16 people injured. Sulaimaniyah’s civil defence said on Friday that the rescue operation to find the victims lasted 17 hours. Firefighters managed to contain the fire that broke out after the gas cylinder exploded in the second-largest city in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. “A total of 15 bodies have been pulled out from under the rubble,” said the head of civil defence in the city, Diyar Ibrahim, according to the official Iraqi News Agency.