LOS ANGELES: Amid havoc of Iraq, news organizations in Baghdad have hunkered down, putting their offices into one or another hotel and paying to build defences. The Hamra Hotel — where Newsday is based, along with The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, NBC and others — is surrounded by cast-concrete vehicle barriers, security guards with AK-47s and security cameras like the one that produced TV pictures of Friday’s bombing.
Those defences, and the warnings against leaving them, mean that covering Baghdad these days is a bit like working from a prison.
In the past month, limited to carefully planned forays from the Hamra enclave, I found my greatest access to daily life for ordinary Iraqis in watching the apartments across the street. The most visible were the women, hair in buns and covered in scarves, who hung laundry or did chores on the balconies, and the children, who played soccer on the asphalt just outside the blast wall of the Hamra, where the journalists and our Iraqi colleagues often parked our cars.
One day last week, our unknown neighbours across the street set dozens of plastic lawn chairs in a square around the asphalt. Minibuses full of women and girls in brightly coloured dresses and men in shirts and slacks pulled into the lot and a band blasted Arabic love songs for dancing wedding guests. The party ended at 8:30pm, though. No one wants to be the last car on the street before curfew.
The next morning, women’s wails of grief — in Iraq the sure signal of the death of a loved one — erupted from the apartment building’s first floor. Journalists and Iraqi ladies rushed to balconies on our respective sides of the street and peered down. Had the death happened on the journalists’ side of the street, I’d have learned the details. As it was, I never did.
On Friday, the suicide bombs clearly were aimed at the foreigners in the Hamra — the first blast meant to open a hole for a truck to drive through. But our costly defences held and no one in our building was reported killed. Across the street, the bombs swept balconies and rooms from the face of the building as a fist might smash a sand castle. Eight people were reported dead by nightfall, and the asphalt soccer field and dance floor is now a crater.
In a way, that means there was no real news at the Hamra on Friday, because as on virtually every day, most who die are not those who fight or are there by choice — but rather those trapped in the middle.—Dawn/Los Angeles Times News Service
