One of Ours

I set off for the internet [cafe]. I’m wearing the poker face I’ve learnt from the Iraqi women to deflect harassment, staring straight ahead, slightly fiercely, not responding to any shouts or remarks, even greetings, because as soon as one man sees you say hello to another, you’re fair game.
The air seems impossibly full for a second and then bursts with a roar, sending a tremor through the ground that shoots up the leg my weight is on, unbalancing me slightly, but the poker face doesn’t flinch. Young men start running past me towards the direction of the explosion. That’s when the shock hits me: I’ve learnt to ignore things blowing up behind me...

...I carry on towards the internet, the old men ask me the same question. “Wayn infijar?”
I tell them the shebab say it was a hotel.
“Al-Sadeer?”
I don’t know, but they say it was a car bomb.
No, they insist straight away. It wasn’t a car bomb. It was a missile. One of them points to the sky and traces the arc of the thing just to make sure I understand...

..It’s weirdly dislocating to find the next street live on TV, Al-Jazeera bring on the scene almost instantaneously because the hotel where they live and work is behind the one blown up. The men in the internet say it was the Funduq Burj Lubnaan - the Lebanon Tower Hotel, an apartment hotel used mainly by families from other Arab countries...

...When they discover I speak a bit of Arabic, everyone wants to talk. I can’t find anyone who accepts that it was a car bomb. The US soldiers say it was a thousand pounds of plastic explosive wrapped in some kind of artillery...

...Unanimously people insist it was a missile. It came from the air. I ask everyone, did you see it yourself? No, no, they all say, but as we’re leaving there’s one who says he saw it. He points to his right, my left, opposite the demolished hotel, but behind the row of buildings which faced it. He says he was standing close to where he is now and he saw it. He thinks it was the Americans, as do all the men around him, all the people who came to talk.

Of course, it could be denial, scapegoating, wanting to blame someone and something else, something foreign for all the problems, to avoid having to address them from within. It could be. Like the Ashura bombing, like dozens of smaller explosions, a lot of people think it’s a tactic by the US troops to foment troubles between Shia and Sunni as a justification for prolonging the occupation...

...A year after the war, where is the truth? Bulldozed and arranged for the camera, dead and buried under the rubble.