Wounded, and Stories of Loss, Fill a Hospital

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Wounded, and Stories of Loss, Fill a Hospital

Christoph Bangert for The New York Times

A blood-stained bed at the hospital in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad after two suicide bombings on Friday.

By SAM DAGHER
Published: April 24, 2009


BAGHDAD — Ahmed Zuhair sat on a bed in the hospital in Kadhimiya on Friday, holding a bandaged and bloody boy, about 3 years old, whom he did not know. Mr. Zuhair had come looking for a relative after two suicide bombers killed at least 60 people, but overwhelmed doctors told him to take the boy, who had lost his whole family, to another floor.

Attacks this deadly are not as common in Iraq now, but the scene was the same as in the darkest days of the sectarian war.

“Lord, my whole family is gone, gone,” screamed an old man, barefoot, outside the hospital. He fell down on the sidewalk sobbing.

A man from a nearby kiosk lifted him up, put his arm around him and walked him through the gate.

“He lost 13 members of his family,” someone said.

Inside, the air was heavy with stories of sudden separation.

At the door of the morgue, men shrieked as an elderly woman soaked in blood was sheathed into a plastic bag, then into a wooden coffin.

Nearly half of those who died outside Kadhimiya’s Shiite shrine were pilgrims from neighboring Iran, while many others were Iraqis trekking to Kadhimiya for a family weekend outing. They usually pray at the shrine and then stroll, eat or shop in the warren of narrow alleys that make up the adjacent market.

Nawal Khalid had gone with 14 of her relatives in a minibus from Baghdad’s Sadr City. Six of them were killed or wounded.

On one bed, Nawras Abbas cried out for her son, Mohammed, 10. Her husband, Ahmed Abdul-Razzaq, choking on his tears, did not tell her that their son was dead.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/world/middleeast/25scene.html?hp