Violent awakening in battle of pen versus the sword

Nothing can prepare you for that moment when a suicide bomb is suddenly aimed at you, writes Catherine Philip in Baghdad
November 21, 2005

THE blast ripped through the room at 8.20am, spraying fragments of glass and plaster across the bed, throwing me out on to the floor on the other side just as the wooden door jamb flew past and landed by my feet.

Lying on the ground, awake for only seconds, I knew exactly what had happened. A suicide bomb, yes, like so many mornings in Baghdad. But this time, it was the one we had long feared and expected, aimed at our hotel full of foreign journalists.

My ears still half-deafened by the blast, I lay on the floor next to the bed, knowing too well what could happen next. First came the volleys of automatic fire, the shouts of guards, then the sound of screaming. Then, seconds later, even louder than the first, another blast that sent the whole building shaking all over again.

Pulling the bedsheets around me, I crawled next door to the bathroom, the only room in our suite with no windows. I needn't have bothered. Not a single shard of glass remained in the windows to fly out and injure me.

No matter how many times you run through the scenario, how well you know the drills, nothing can really prepare you for that moment when a suicide bombing of the sort that occurs daily in Baghdad is suddenly aimed at you. That realisation comes long after the roar that knocks you off your feet and the robotic work mode that you suddenly slip into as the shock ebbs away.

I pulled on the first clothes I could find, picked up a bag with personal documents, and ran for the door. On the way down I met the security guards for NBC. "It's building two," they said, referring to the adjacent tower of the hotel. "It's taken the worst."

I ran down the remaining nine flights of stairs to the ground floor. Shattered glass and smears of blood covered the reception floor.

Dazed staff wandered around searching for one another. Outside, the courtyard was strewn with charred gobbets of flesh, the unmistakable sign of a suicide bombing that I had seen on Baghdad's streets so many times before. At the end of the road, a woman in a black abaya was screaming, searching for her missing husband.

Two men rushed out of a neighbouring apartment block, the side of which had been ripped off. They were carrying a child still dressed in her pink pyjamas, bloodied and weeping. It was the little girl who used to wave at me from her balcony. Her family lived half in, half out, of the blast wall that surrounded our hotel complex and was supposed to protect us from such an attack.

Now the concrete blocks lay toppled like dominoes, peppered with shrapnel. Later, we learned how the wall had been blasted open by a first suicide truck packed with explosives in order to clear the way for a second aimed at the hotel -- the same tactic used a month earlier against the Palestine Hotel.

It was the sheer scale of the insurgents' ambition that saved our lives. The crater and pile of debris created by the first explosion was so huge that the second lorry could not get through. It detonated where it was, killing at least eight of those living in the surrounding flats. Miraculously, not a single journalist was killed. As so often happens, innocent Iraqis were the victims.

Of all the media hotels in Baghdad, al-Hamra, where The Times has its office, is the most legendary, an iconic war correspondents' hotel.

The seedy, unloved Palestine Hotel, while host to several large agencies and television stations, is also home to scores of security contractors and is guarded by the US military. When it was bombed last month, it was speculated that it was the journalists they were after. Or maybe, others surmised, the bombers just wanted to get their spectacular explosion captured on live television. "Blow up a bomb around the media and you'll write about it," Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Roth said, confirming that we had been the target of the bomb. "Or else they just have something against the media."

I was less sure that they wanted us to write about it. They would not have tried to kill us if they did.

Liz, a friend from the Chicago Tribune, led me through her destroyed office suite, showing me where the ceiling tiles had fallen on her sleeping translator and driver. Kim Sengupta, from The Independent, showed me where a 20cm spear of glass had landed inches from his head.

I walked back to the hotel reception courtyard, where a crowd of guards stood around looking at the severed foot of one of the bombers lying by a tree. A hand and a penis lay metres away.

I sat down on a concrete bolster for a moment and thought about my friend Marla, killed in a suicide bombing on the airport road in April along with her beloved colleague Fais.

I thought about Nadia, the bereaved bride from the Amman hotel bombings who had cried on my shoulder only a week before.

I walked back inside the hotel and into the courtyard between the two towers where the swimming pool is, where Marla used to pound up and down every day, where, after the war, bacchanalian evenings unfolded among the press corps, with bottles of wine downed and colleagues thrown into the pool fully dressed. "One day someone'll toss a grenade in here," someone quipped.

That was in the old days though, just after the war, before the first suicide bombing came and changed it all.

At the poolside, the pool boy fished around in the water for shrapnel thrown there by the blast. He pulled up the net to find a piece of a bomber's skull, with the matted hair still intact.

I went back inside to my room, where the shattered window, held together by a plastic blast shield, had caved in on the computer, and tried to drag it off.

Then I sat down and started to write. Because whatever those people who blew themselves up trying to kill us believe, that is what we are here to do.

The Times

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