- Mystification. why would a bomber blow himself up to
destroy a restaurant? There's no doubt that the man who killed eight diners
in Nabil's on Wednesday was a suicide attacker.
-
- One of the waiters, a balding, angry man, showed me what
was left of him yesterday. Flesh in the forecourt, a set of four blackened
fingers below a wall. "You want a chicken tikka?" he asked cruelly.
But these are cruel times.
-
- Next door, every member of the family in the now broken
villa was taken to hospital. I knew them all. A few months ago, when the
hotel across the road was bombed, I'd lent them my phone to call their
relatives in America.
-
- "Al-hamdulila - praise be to God - we are all OK,"
the mother had shouted down the line to Detroit. Not any more. Her husband
was hurt in the chest by the blast. All her daughters were cut, too. Why
them?
-
- In any other land, there would be a forensic science
laboratory and someone would have taken those fingers away for identification.
But the Americans were only looking for the detonator. Some hope. The bomber's
Oldsmobile was almost atomised. Did he think someone from the occupation
authorities was among the diners at the New Year's Eve belly-dancing party?
-
- Mystification. I am talking to a young American soldier
from the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment. He's just down from the Syrian
border. "We had a problem there," he says. "A guy got hostile
with our men last night. Pulled a knife. He was shot dead." A knife?
The guy pulled a knife on a soldier? No information in the papers, of course.
No mention of the dead Iraqi in the occupation power's usual press conference.
-
- Mystification. Just two days before Christmas, I am driving
the desert road at night west of Ramadi. This is bandit country, a death
trap for Americans and insurgents alike. Then to the south, there is a
great fire, flickering with explosions, shell bursts, flares, streaks of
tracer. The light burns brightly on the horizon, pulsates orange and red
for almost 20 minutes, the time it takes my car to reach Fallujah. But
next day, no one reports a fire. Nothing in the papers. Someone must know.
Can't the Americans, watching all this from their satellites, account for
this blazing fire in the night?
-
- Mystification. I am in a traffic jam in the Muthhana
area of Baghdad, a thieves' paradise, next to a beat-up Toyota with a bearded
man at the wheel. The driver's window is broken, the door doesn't close
properly, the registration plates have fallen off.
-
- "Well, you're safe," I shout at him. "No
one's going to steal your car." The man grins back at me. "No,
they can't steal my car," he roars, then reaches to the floor of his
vehicle. He comes up with his false left leg and dangles it out of the
window towards me. "And they can't steal me either." Chicken
tikka? False legs? Where do the Iraqis find their sense of humour?
-
- http://bt.premium-link.net/$59122$1046924269$/story.jsp?cb_content_name=A+cruel+sense+of+
humour+is+all+that+is+left+for+Iraqis+to+cling+to+after+a+suicide+bombing&story=477391&host=
3&dir=668&style_sheet=null
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