![]() Most of Camp Sara’s Christians have been driven away by violence. Today, the buildings are cleaned up, but the street looks the same, down to the electricity poles that haven’t moved. Camp Sara was once one of the nicest parts of Baghdad, with good restaurants and a different vibe from the rest of the city. The explosion was only one of many by Sunni Muslim extremists that hit Christian areas over the years. Aren’t these Iraqis? What is their crime?” “You have no God,” a resident named Dureid shouted in his shock as if the militants behind the blast were there to listen. Everyone was running - either away from danger or toward loved ones to see if they were alive. Others used tarps to carry pieces of bodies. Some young men carried a frail elderly woman on a chair to safety. At least 16 people were killed and dozens wounded. All along a block of the avenue, buildings were shattered, blackened, a few collapsed almost completely. 4, 2006, two car bombs went off within minutes of each a few dozen meters apart on a main commercial street of the district. As Armenians fled oppression in Turkiye and elsewhere in the early 20th century, she let refugees settle on her land, and by the 1950s, it was built up as an almost entirely Christian neighborhood. ![]() This Baghdad district got its name from a wealthy Armenian Christian woman who once owned the area when it was farmland. This intersection was their last resting place. Those closest to a bomb seem to evaporate without a trace, I thought. I relived that day 16 years ago like I was watching it in a cinema. The minibuses blared their horns, and people thronged a nearby street market. I went back to Sadriyah several weeks ago. I saw the look of silent terror in the eyes of the girl as she trailed her mother, holding her little sister and absorbing the scene. ![]() She smeared ashes on her face as she screamed for her missing husband: “Ahmed, where did you go? I can’t do it without you. The mother’s feet were bare, covered in ash. She was with her mother, searching among the remaining debris and body parts. The next day when I went back, I saw the girl. Survivors loaded pieces of human beings onto wooden vegetable pushcarts to take away. Blackened bodies were strewn among twisted, smoldering minibuses. The stench of burned flesh filled my nostrils. We were among the first on the scene at Sadriyah. When it went off, I was at the site of that morning’s first bombing, which had killed dozens, and as the firefighters rushed to the second blast, I hitched a ride with them. In this large intersection jammed with minibuses loading up passengers, a car bomb ripped through the crowds on April 18, 2007, killing at least 140 in what was then one of the deadliest single bombings since the US invasion. Here are the stories behind a few of them. This series of composites joins some of my photos from the years of the US occupation and new ones from today, aiming to bring together past and present. Iraqis today remember the pervasive fear of that era, but with so many bombings, the specifics of individual attacks may have faded. At the height of the sectarian butchery following the invasion, I and other photographers rushed to the scenes of suicide bombings, rocket strikes and shootings around Baghdad nearly every day, sometimes multiple times a day. For me, each site has become indelibly linked to the carnage I saw and the pain people suffered there.Īs an Associated Press photographer, I covered 20 years of turmoil since the US-led invasion of my country. Today, people go about their daily business in these places, perhaps no longer thinking of the horror that took place years ago right where they are walking. BAGHDAD: There are places around Baghdad where I’ll sometimes say a silent prayer for the dead when I pass - on certain residential streets, at a particular restaurant, in a square where minibuses gather.
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