BAGHDAD, Iraq – After a late night writing about men who apparently were tortured in the back rooms of an Iraqi Interior Ministry building, I fell asleep on the couch in Knight Ridder’s hotel in Baghdad early Friday morning, hoping for an easy day.
I awoke to the ground shaking under me. A thunderous boom cracked the windows on our floor in the Hamra Hotel. I ran to a small alcove near the door and waited.
In less than 30 seconds another blast rocked the building, blowing out windows and window frames and sending a crack up one wall of our floor. Then gunfire broke out.
I wasn’t a brave war correspondent.
I crouched in the narrow space between the door and wall, and I cried.
This was it, I thought. This was the final moment for a reporter living outside the heavily fortified Green Zone, where U.S. diplomats and Iraqi politicians live. Scenarios raced through my head in the next 10 seconds, clouded by the awful noise of the bombs. By the time that Paul, our British security adviser, came to my door, I was convinced that insurgents had stormed the building.
He ordered me to put on a vest of body armor and a helmet, and we sat in the windowless hallway of the Knight Ridder bureau, waiting for safety.
A white van had blasted through the high concrete walls that protected one end of our hotel complex, which houses many foreign journalists. About 23 seconds later, a flatbed truck that U.S. Brig. Gen. Karl Horst said probably was heading to the front entrance of our hotel got caught in the deep hole excavated by the first bomb. It detonated with a man inside. He never made it to his target.
We all lived, except for the man who made the cookies and pastries in the bakery.
Ali Abdul Salam walked to work as he always did that morning. But on Friday the white van, which breezed down a road that typically has an Iraqi police checkpoint, backed up to the blast wall as Ali walked up to an opening in the concrete. The blast took Ali and put smoke, fire and rubble in his place.
Maybe some of the burnt flesh that landed by the pool is his, or the foot in front of the hotel entrance or the arm found in the gym on the fifth floor. Or maybe they’re the remnants of the bomber, who took his own life, Ali’s and the lives of a little girl and her mother.
Later I walked toward the rubble about 50 yards from the hotel entrance. Behind the destroyed blast walls I watched Iraqi men and women comb through the remains of their things. The front of an apartment building had been blasted away. It lay in a pile of concrete rubble. Four dead people and an injured man were pulled from the ruins later.
A young boy stood in front of his family’s shack, which now was a pile of twisted sheet metal and cinder blocks. His parents and brother had been sent to the hospital.
Nearby on a dusty blue van someone had rubbed away the dust on the front end to spell “God Bless Us.” Also in the dust, “Zarqawi” – the name of the terrorist leader who instills fear in most Iraqis – mocked the comforting words.
My employer, Knight Ridder, provides security for me as a Western journalist in Iraq. But Iraqis live each day on the dangerous roads of this capital city without the blast walls, guards and coiled concertina wire that protected me today.
This is a place where people are thankful when only 10 innocent victims die in suicide bombings or gunfights.
It’s a place where traffic isn’t a nuisance, it’s frightening. If something explodes, there’s nowhere to go.
It’s a place where you leave your home praying that you’ll make it back, and when you do, you thank God that you lived today. In the back of your mind, you know you still aren’t safe.
Our Iraqi staffer Zaineb was walking to the office when it happened. She was thrown to the ground by the blast, and a guard grabbed her arms and dragged her into a house before the second bomb hit.
She went home shaken and waited for her hearing to return. It did.
Another staffer walked into our hallway in shock with a cut around his eye. His nearby house was outside the protection of the high concrete walls. His neighbor was buried in the rubble.
He asked us to bandage his eye, and he returned to his family.
Upstairs at the Hamra, I waited for the feeling of safety to return Friday.
As I write these words, like most Iraqis, I’m still waiting.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll live another day, and that feeling will return.
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