Saturday, March 22, 2008
Have you ever survived a bomb explosion?
If so, you can probably feel empathy for Ali as he describes his experience with a pair of car bombs and the aftermath.
In a shy, soft voice Ali tells me how he had been standing with a friend in Karrada when a bomb went off at the side of the road. "I heard an explosion very close by," he says. "I saw smoke and chaos and people screaming. I saw my friend Hassan, who was running and carrying a child who had lost an arm. I saw a nice-looking girl - the Karrada girls, you know how beautiful they are. She was dead. And I saw a girl who had only one eye.But Ali was not lucky enough to escape without taking some shrapnel himself.
"I couldn't bear it," he tells me. "I started to scream and cry.
"Then suddenly there was another explosion. This time, you know, I didn't hear much, I just saw a tall column of orange fire a few metres away from me and then smoke. I didn't know what had happened, but the people who had run over to tend the injured from the first bomb were now lying on the street screaming.
At the hospital, Ali and the others sat in a corridor waiting to be treated by the overstretched medical team. "There were children there who were all red," he remembers. "It looked as if they had no faces, they were so covered with blood."They may have been short of anesthesia and pain killers, but at least he had a doctor to pull out the big pieces. Just another day in George W Bush's Great Blessing on Iraq.
After waiting a while he was transferred to another hospital, where a doctor examined him. "The doctor told me I just had two bits of shrapnel in my arm and leg," Ali says. "He asked me why I was crying. I told him it wasn't for myself but for all the boys and girls around me."
The doctor took out what looked like pliers and asked Ali to look away. "He got the first bullet out, but the second didn't come so easily and I screamed."
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