How a Bomb Shattered a Reporter’s Detachment

The table was supposed to have been ours.

It was New Year’s Eve, and we wanted to get a sense of the Iraqi mood by joining the party at Nabil’s Restaurant, a popular hangout. As the day wore on, our group -- foreign journalists and Iraqi staff -- had grown larger. A picture taken before we headed out shows us, dressed up and smiling, offering a plastic-cup champagne toast.

When the first two in our group arrived at Nabil’s, the waiter showed them to the table in the back corner, the table we had reserved. But the booth was cramped, certainly too small for our expanded entourage. The waiter agreed to move us to a larger table, closer to the front of the restaurant.

Almost immediately, two Iraqi couples took our place in the corner booth. The foursome, out to celebrate the advent of a new year without Saddam Hussein, had become fast friends of late. Omar Ajeely and Mahmoud Mear-Jabar were starting a cellular phone business together. Their wives, Dina and Hiam, were pregnant. Both were mixed Shiite-Sunni marriages.

They arrived at the restaurant in the dark blue BMW Omar had just bought and joined the restaurant din of Arabic music and lively conversation.

It was about 9 p.m.

*

At our new table, The Times bureau’s computer expert, Mohammed Arrawi, and his fiancee were met by Saad Khalaf, a photographer and one of our part-time drivers. They waited for us.

Outside, Times reporter Chris Kraul and driver Ammar Mohammed pulled up in their old Mercedes and began to parallel park behind Omar’s BMW. I followed a few seconds behind them in a small SUV driven by Nasif Duleimy, with fellow correspondent Ann Simmons in the back seat. Chris and Ammar saw a white Oldsmobile barreling the wrong way down the street toward them. They saw it veer to their right, cross their path, then crash into the back wall of Nabil’s.

The explosion was so loud I couldn’t hear it. It was a muffled pop and a flash of light. It lifted our car into the air with a jolt, slammed us down, then sent searing-hot glass shards, metal and gravel slicing into our faces, necks and hands with the force of a fast, hard punch.

Blood gushing from our heads, Nasif and I were able to shoulder-butt our way out of the crumpled front of the car, and someone pulled Ann from the back.

We staggered into a panicked chaos of flames, smoke and screams. People were running helter-skelter, frantic. It was difficult to breathe, and sight and sound became a blurry swirl. A colleague, Said Rifai, helped Chris, conscious but the most seriously wounded, from his car. Ammar managed to pull himself out.

Inside the restaurant, it was hell. Saad, a solid man weighing about 200 pounds, was hurled across the room like a rag doll. Mohammed and his fiancee, Atiaf, were thrown to the ground under a collapsed roof of beams and brick.

Mohammed managed to use his injured head to ram open the front door of the restaurant, gather Atiaf in his arms and carry her to safety.

And in the back of the restaurant, in the corner, two couples lay crushed to death, at the table that was supposed to have been ours.

*

The bombing at Nabil’s, which lighted the black sky and echoed throughout an edgy city, seems a minor event in the catalog of horrors since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Dozens of other bomb attacks have been recorded since, most far more deadly than the New Year’s Eve blast with its total of eight victims.

Few targets, however, have been as plainly civilian as the restaurant. And it doesn’t take a large death toll to destroy families, exhaust spirits and torment a society.

Six months after the bombing, Mohammed, our computer tech, and I sought out the families of those killed. We wanted to talk to them about their loved ones, learn who they were. It was extremely painful; every meeting ended in tears.

Journalists ordinarily maintain a distance from their subjects, a shield. It’s a defense mechanism, the skill or instinct that allows reporters to continue writing, thinking and asking the next question even as the person being interviewed recounts horrific acts or unimaginable circumstances.

In this case, distance was impossible. We had endured treatment and surgery, but we had survived the bombing that claimed the sons and daughters of the people we were interviewing. We were witness, in a way, to their children’s deaths. We survived. Their children did not.

“Did you see them?” were among the very first words that came from each mother. And at the same time, Mohammed and I realized that the devastated people we were interviewing -- the elderly father staring into space, the anguished mother asking why, the weeping sister -- could have been our own parents and siblings, had things turned out just a bit differently.

We never tell the families that we were supposed to have been sitting at the back corner table in Nabil’s Restaurant on New Year’s Eve.

*

Both couples married for love, the families say -- not by arrangement -- and were full of hope about the future. Both Dina and Hiam were bringing children into the world, and their husbands Omar and Mahmoud were eager to exploit the entrepreneurial opportunities of the emerging Iraq.

The couples had met two years ago on a picnic excursion to Iraq’s verdant north, the kind of organized vacation packages common before the fall of Saddam Hussein. In snapshots their families eagerly show me, the four are smiling on that trip, and the men seem to be sharing a joke of some kind. The women cover their hair with scarves but do not wear other, stricter clothing.

Mahmoud was his parents’ only son, born to them late in life after a string of daughters. As Shiite Muslims, they were none too happy when Mahmoud, an engineer, announced that he had fallen in love with and would marry Hiam, an architect from a Sunni tribe in Tikrit -- Hussein’s home base. But everyone became enamored of Hiam when they met her, so loving and kind, and with a sense of humor that clearly delighted Mahmoud.

In the Arab world, the preeminent role of the son cannot be overstated. The father and mother will forever be referred to by the eldest son’s name -- Abu (“Father of”) Mahmoud and Umm (“Mother of”) Mahmoud, in the case of Mahmoud’s parents -- and the eldest son will assume management of the family and all family business at the appropriate time.

And so the loss for Mahmoud’s family is all-encompassing. A large picture of a plump, mustachioed Mahmoud, who was 28 when he died, hangs on the wall in the Mear-Jabar living room, a comfortable home in Baghdad’s middle-class Jamiaa neighborhood. Born when his father was in his 50s, Mahmoud had become his parents’ sole support and the authority figure for all of his female relatives.

His four elder sisters, ranging in age from 33 to 38, stream into the room on our first visit. All are dressed from head to toe in black, in mourning. They help their father, Ahmed, 80, onto the sofa beside their mother, Faeza. The parents are retired high school teachers.

It will be quite a while before Ahmed, with a head of thick white hair, speaks, his gaze distant.

“My father’s tears do not stop,” says Nihad, the youngest daughter.

The two unmarried sisters, Maha, the eldest, and Zainab, are now in charge of running the cellular phone business that Mahmoud had started -- not an easy job for women in this culture. A male relative must come at night to pick up the sisters and help them close the store. Ahmed spends his days sitting vacantly in the shop, just so that those outside see a male figure.

Ahmed had bought a large plot in the cemetery at the Shiite holy city of Najaf and buried his own father there. He fully expected that he would be the next to be interred. Instead, on a cold day in January, Ahmed buried his only son.

*

Our first meeting with Omar’s family is at his father’s flower shop on a traffic roundabout in downtown Baghdad. Raad Ajeely does not want us to talk to his wife and daughter. It will make them too sad, he says. The memories are still too painful and raw.

Omar was the eldest son. A gifted sketch artist who doted on his only sister and took care to remember birthdays, the 28-year-old studied graphic design with Dina and had an idea to expand the family florist shop into an interior decorating firm.

From below his desk, next to a stand of plastic zinnias, Raad pulls out photographs. Omar and Dina, beaming at their wedding, she in elaborate white with golden flowers in her hair, he with his dark mustache neatly trimmed. They pose at their home, in their garden, on vacation and, later, with their young son, Khattab.

And then the picture of Omar’s dark blue BMW. Bought 10 days before he was killed and now, in the photo, crumpled like a piece of foil. I tell Raad that it looks a lot like the car I climbed out of. He soon relents on our visiting his wife and daughter.

“We hide all of the pictures,” Raad says. “We don’t want Khattab to see them.”

The child is nearly 3. He is fair-skinned and blond, just like his father was at that age. Omar and Dina’s parents, the two sets of grandparents, share in caring for the orphaned boy.

Later, at Raad’s home, the boy clings to his two grandmothers, both shrouded in black, and hides his face. He cannot be coaxed into a game of peekaboo.

Khattab has not been told that his parents were killed (“What do you tell a 3-year-old?”) but his grandparents think he must know. He does not speak their names. Sometimes, in a state of sleepiness in his grandparents’ bed, he will try to nurse from his grandmother, as he used to do with Dina when he was upset.

The two families are neighbors in the well-to-do Aladel district where Sunnis and Shiites share the block in apparent harmony. Omar, a Sunni, and Dina, a Shiite, were smitten in elementary school, engaged during college. And in January, they were buried side by side, under a single tombstone, in Baghdad’s Al Karkh Cemetery.

“They lived their whole lives together,” says Dina’s mother, Firyal Qilabi. “And they died together.”

A chance encounter provided Raad with the most concrete details of his son’s death.

A unit from the U.S. Army’s 1st Armored Division, 2nd Brigade, stopped by the florist shop a couple of weeks after the bombing to buy flowers. When Raad told the soldiers that his son had been killed at the restaurant, they told him that they had been the first military team on the scene.

The soldiers described finding Omar’s body on top of a table, crushed by a metal bar. Dina was on the floor. Hiam, partially buried in rubble, initially survived the blast and rambled deliriously. She died before they could pull her free. After telling Raad the story, each soldier filed solemnly through the florist shop and shook his hand.

*

Though troubled, chaotic and dangerous, Baghdad last December was a safer place than it would become in the spring and summer. Westerners were not yet being kidnapped and could eat at restaurants or shop in public. Iraqis, with some trepidation, were still enjoying something of a nightlife.

Still, Omar and Mahmoud weren’t cavalier about safety. They were careful about going out, especially after dark. Mahmoud had never been to Nabil’s; Omar had eaten there a few times but wasn’t a regular. For New Year’s, a holiday Iraqis celebrate even though it is not part of the Islamic calendar, a party of sorts was planned at Nabil’s, and Omar thought that it would be fun. There would be music and a prix fixe menu.

“I told him it was too dangerous to go out,” Mahmoud’s father recalls.

“He told me not to worry, that they were going to a small restaurant, one that was safe and not too public.”

We made a similar calculation. A single-story building the color of butterscotch, Nabil’s was on Arasat Street, a main thoroughfare crowded with businesses. It was set back a good distance from the street, behind a low-slung wall, a position I figured protected it from a car bomb. The bomber, as it turned out, would approach from a side road, hitting the more exposed back of the restaurant.

Nabil’s was one of many eateries and clubs marking that New Year’s Eve with festivities, though more low-key than in years past because of the uncertainties of occupied Iraq. That’s what I wanted to write about. Owned by a successful Christian Iraqi, it attracted Westerners (though most of the clientele was Iraqi), and it sold alcohol (as did several other establishments). Some of this may have helped make it a target.

About 35 people were injured at Nabil’s and survived. The bomber did not. Iraqi police found a piece of his calf on the roof of a nearby building two days later.

*

As with most bad things that happen in Iraq, it’s hard to separate the rumors from the facts. Facts are a pretty elastic commodity in a society that for generations has survived by cushioning and distorting ugly truths.

Amid the rumors, the U.S. military conducted its own investigation and, on St. Patrick’s Day, arrested a man officers described as the mastermind of the restaurant bombing.

Ammar Allami, who neighbors said worked as a truck driver, was accused of having helped the bomber mount 500 pounds of explosives and rig a detonator, which apparently exploded prematurely, killing the bomber along with his victims. Allami was picked up in the same Karada neighborhood where Nabil’s is located and where two hotels were later targeted.

Allami spent about three months in several U.S.-run prisons, including the notorious Abu Ghraib facility, but was let go in late June. Through his family he denied any role in the bombing.

The families of the victims at Nabil’s, however, learned none of this. Months after the bombing, they were still consumed with rumors and speculation. And with questions about why their children died.

One rumor that continues to swirl is that Nabil Helami, the owner, had been threatened a short time before New Year’s Eve and warned against opening that night. He opened anyway, inviting disaster.

Nabil denies this. True, he acknowledges, he was not at the restaurant, but only because his baby-sitter called in sick at the last minute and he stayed home with his wife and daughter. He sent his brother to run things in his stead -- something he would not have done, he says, if he had thought the establishment was under threat.

Nabil, who prides himself on managing to keep his restaurant open during the Hussein era and through most of the war, has finally been defeated. He is not rebuilding.

At first, Raad, Omar’s father, wanted to blame Nabil. Now he speaks of God’s will. And, he and the other relatives say, if there is anyone to blame, it’s the Americans. This would not have happened before the Americans came, they say, time and again.

“People went to parties, celebrated, and nothing happened,” says Omar’s mother, Atiya. “The situation changed because of the Americans.”

By “Americans,” I know they don’t mean me, but they do mean me. My presence in Iraq is part of the American occupation, as far as they are concerned. I know they are thinking that my being at Nabil’s contributed to their children’s deaths.

“Under Saddam, as long as you didn’t go against the regime, you weren’t hurt,” says Dina’s mother, Firyal. “Now, without doing anything, you get hurt.”

Dina’s father, an officer in Hussein’s army, spoke out against him and was thrown in jail. Even that experience, faded with time, now seems tolerable compared with today’s grief.

Raad, who chain-smokes despite a recent operation for throat cancer, cannot fathom how he survived a battle in the Iran-Iraq war in which 15,000 men died -- and yet his eldest son dies at a restaurant.

By now, I had come to know a little bit about these people who were killed in my place. But I have no answers for their families.

So the conversations continue as we meet, talk and finally dine with the families of the dead. They are remarkably hospitable to us -- people who are living apparitions of a nightmare. Even with a family clearly still in mourning, we share a formidable lunch at Raad’s house. We sit down to a table brimming with plates of chicken and almonds, hummus, rice, lamb and okra.

Omar’s sister, Rusha, 24, miscarried after the bombing but is pregnant again. She joins us but doesn’t eat.

“I don’t think they did anything wrong,” she says of her much-adored brother and sister-in-law. “Everyone was celebrating. Omar loved to take his wife out. They were proud of their clothes and of looking good. And then they disappeared. Were they guilty of something? Were they to blame?”

Of all the discussions, it may be Rusha’s words that most haunt me. Guilt. Blame. They didn’t do anything wrong. Did I do anything wrong? Was it wrong for me to be there that night? Why did I survive? Just as I have no answers for these people, I have no answers for myself.

The conversation is lively, if bleak, and goes on for a long time as we linger over the dining table. We turn to the emerging politics, worsening ethnic tensions, even the lack of electricity.

Finally, it is too much for a grieving mother. Let’s change the subject, Atiya says with the kind of tight smile that is molded by sorrow, with the corners of the mouth upturned but eyes full of pain.

“Let’s talk about something pleasant,” she says.

We look down at our plates for a few moments. We are silent.

*

Wilkinson, The Times’ Rome Bureau chief, is periodically on assignment in Baghdad.