Abdullah was driving back to Sulaimaniyah from Erbil in the evening of July 2 to avoid the sweltering heat wave that had brought life to standstill during the day. As he approached the hills of Tasluja to the west of the city just after 9:30, he saw a fire raging. Soon he heard deafening explosions that sent what appeared to be missiles and mortar shells into the air, lighting up the sky and sending Tasluja's bewildered residents running for their lives. Abdullah, not his real name, knew that a weapons and ammunition depot was on fire.

Two days earlier there had been another terrifying explosion at a peshmerga ammunition depot in Bahrka just outside Erbil. The authorities ruled out foul play and blamed the heat wave and the peshmerga's lack of expertise in storing explosives and arms. No one bought the explanation, including Abdullah.

Abdullah knew the depot well. From 1981 until the end of Iran-Iraq War in 1988, the Baathist authorities forced him and many other truck drivers to carry small munitions and mortar shells from the British-built Al-Rasheed base in southeast Baghdad to Sulaimaniyah. "All these years, there was no incident except in 1986 when the Iranian air force bombed the depot," Abdullah told Al-Monitor a week after the explosion in Sulaimaniyah. "I have seen it. It is a solid depot built into the hill and It is difficult for me to believe that it could just catch fire because of high temperatures." A high-ranking peshmerga officer who worked for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) confirmed that while the depot was old, it was built according to international standards and high temperatures cannot explain the explosion.

The explosion in Sulaimaniyah was followed by another at an ammunition depot in Dahuk on July 3. Two days later, another fire in Chwarqurna, in Sulaimaniyah province, broke out in the depot of an arms dealer that burned for over 45 minutes. In 2017 there were at least two other explosions at peshmerga ammunition and arms depots in Erbil.