Car Bomb

Posted by mauer

Posted: February 24, 2007 - 9:42 am

[Note: Audio links added Feb. 26]

BAGHDAD, Feb. 24 — There was a big explosion outside about 5 p.m. today, the closest blast to the hotel since I arrived here five weeks ago. Cautiously, I stepped out on the balcony.

Car bomb. Photos by Mohammed Al Dulaimy.

The kiosk outside, within the security zone of the hotel, was doing its normal trade — two or three people from the neighborhood buying vegetables or candy bars. Several men from the hotel’s security squad were walking briskly toward the boulevard where the sound came from. A woman dressed all in black was running from that direction, gesturing wildly. Moments later, she reappeared with a man pushing a large two-wheel cart. They rushed toward the explosion.

Kevin, our British security guy, summoned me to the hallway, away from the windows. A second bomb often follows the first, or a round of mortars. They know a crowd gathers at a bombing site.

It stayed silent and I went back to work. Forty-five minutes later, Mohammed Al Dulaimy, one of our Iraqi journalists, and our Iraqi security man from the Kurdistan region, charged into my room.

“Come, come, let’s go to the car bomb,” Mohammed said. “Don’t you want to see it?”

In five weeks, I have never left the hotel’s security zone on foot. Now, with a bomb going off, I was going out?

Sure, why not. Kevin reluctantly said OK — the place would be crawling with cops so a kidnapping was unlikely.

We walked out the gate and onto the street. You could see the activity about two blocks away, near the big traffic circle we drive through each time we go out. I had only seen this neighborhood through automobile glass. Walking past the ice cream parlor, the restaurant, the fruit man’s kiosk, felt like a guilty pleasure. The security man, taller than most Iraqis, stayed close, his right hand in his pocket.

The Honda drove by as the car bomb went off.

Three policemen, one of them in uniform, were directing car and foot traffic. They waved us through. Young teenage boys ran in the street. Men were standing around in clusters. As we got close, we could hear the sound of women still screaming almost an hour after the blast. The sidewalk was hosed down, but chunks of sheetmetal were everywhere.

Mohammed brought his new camera. I didn’t want to bring mine — it’s too big and would’ve stood out. I had my voice recorder.

We came to a red Honda peppered with holes, it’s tires flat, its engine still draining. The windshield was shattered but in place, the passenger side windows blown out.

[To listen to the street sounds, click here.]

I followed the trail of water and oil from the Honda about 30 feet to the place where it began: the left lane of the boulevard, adjacent to what was left of a car — a chunk of frame, a wheel, a small pile of sheet metal someone had made while cleaning up.

A tow truck hauls of the wreckage of the Peugeot used in the car bomb.

The person in the red Honda appeared to have been driving by just as the bomb detonated. At least it seemed he was able to make it to the side of the street and park.

The frame of the car bomb looked like a set of old bed springs. We stopped to talk to a cluster of men standing around it just as a tow truck backed up to haul it away. So little was left, I could’ve dragged myself.

It was a Peugeot, said a man in a dishdasha, a relatively new one. Two men parked and walked away. It exploded shortly afterward. Three people were killed — two brothers who ran a kebob stand on the sidewalk, and the son of one of the of the brothers. Mohammed and the security man knew the men — they’ve bought many kebobs from that stand.

The kebob stand were three of the victims were killed.

There wasn’t much left of the stand — scattered charcoal, cooking equipment, baskets to hold a kabob.

We walked to another cluster of witnesses. One man was wailing. Another shouted at us.

[To listen to these men, click here.]

Mohammed translated: Two Afghani men had gotten out of the car and ran, he was saying. They were stopped and turned over to an American patrol in a humvee. But the Afghanis had American papers and they were let go. The Americans brought the Afghans to Iraq. It was all America’s fault, he screamed.

Now the shouting man was pointing toward the traffic circle, where SCIRI, the leading Islamic Party in Iraq and a big friend of Iran, has its headquarters. SCIRI’s militia, the Badr Organization, controls the neighborhood.

“They can’t protect us!” he yelled. “It’s the Iranians, the Iranians,” wailed the other man as he spat out the name of SCIRI’s leader.

Baskets from the kabob stand.

Of course, there was no way to verify any of the claims, or even to ask how they arrived at them. More likely the car bomb, a relatively small explosive device hidden in the trunk, was a nasty message to SCIRI from someone — Al Qaeda, perhaps, if the men truly were Afghanis — that it could attack them anywhere, any time.

The men were growing angrier. It was time to move on.

It was getting dark as we walked past the Honda again and back to the hotel

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