Cluster Bombs - Digital photograph, 2003 by Christopher Holden

By Cathy Breen
Amman, Jordan
Tuesday, March 1, 2005

Dear friends,

SUICIDE BOMBER KILLS 115 is the headline in today’s Jordan Times newspaper.

“Scores of dazed residents searched for loved ones amid the dying and wounded, enveloped in smoke from a suicide car bomb which killed 115 people in Hilla, south of Baghdad, on Monday. Iraqi security agents were forced to fire shots in the air to disperse the growing crowd sucked in to a scene of carnage where 148 were also wounded when the bomb ripped throgh those waiting by a medical centre for a physical check so they could be hired by the government.“

Last night as several of us (5 Iraqi friends, Anna and myself) gathered for dinner at Anna’s apartment. There was a moment of silence and intense grief when someone mentioned this particular suicide bomb. News of this nature, although it has become commonplace, is still met in this part of the world with horror and dismay.

Abu Zayneb was among the guests. We had heard about this dear man from Kerbala through Sheila Provencher of CPT. She thinks very highly of him and considers him like family, so much so that she addresses him as “uncle.” A mechanical engineer by profession, he works as a high school teacher in Kerbala where he was born and raised. In Amman for meetings, he appeared at our hotel the other afternoon quite unexpectedly looking for Kathy and myself. Sheila had sent him to us.