Less than 48 hours ago, Hamra Hotel was full with life and so busy. Journalists from different media were moving in and out of the hotel. The jokes that I used to make with the guards were always pain relief medicine for all of us because of our unstable situation. Less than 48 hours ago, we used to talk about the soccer teams we love and tease each other when the teams play a match and one of them wins. We used to make fun of the sectarian violence because we know each other very well and we realized the fact that no one of us really cares about the differences of the ideologies.

    Since the first moment of the blast, many things changed. When we meet each other, all we talk about is bomb related issues. We woke up from the impact of the explosion and started gathering our thoughts and facing our fears. We started checking about people we know. As a Muslim, I can only say Thanks God for the loss because I can not in any way return the time back to avoid it, what happened had happened

    The image of the hole made by the explosion, the dusty people whose houses were destroyed over them families did not leave my eyes but the scene of my former office terrified me when I went to my bed at the new office where I had to spend the night after blocking the roads for a long time. When I went up to the third floor after the explosion, I was shocked completely. I used to sit near the big glass window which was thrown away by the blast .The image of my scattered body was present in my busy mind.

     The first news I heard today was about to get me crazy. One of my colleagues told me that our friend who works at the cafeteria was severely injured. With the worst cell phone network on earth, my fears grew even bigger because I could not reach him but everything changed minutes later when I could hardly talk to him. He told me that he kept carrying the wounded people and his shirt was covered with blood.

    The good news about our friend could not stop the bad news from visiting me when I received a call from a colleague telling me about the funeral ceremonies of one of the Iraqi reporters who used to work with a western Media. Although I did not recognize the man but I failed in holding my thoughts which flew quickly to the atmosphere inside his house and the scene that had been repeating in this crazy country since 1980, the scene of the crying mother, the weeping wife and the astonished kids who did not realize yet that they lost the father. These feelings grew bigger when my three years son hugged me strongly for a long time as if he felt the danger and may be he did. I did a very short prayers thanking God for our magic moving from the hotel.

   Fears became part of our miserable life in Iraq. Only less than two minutes ago, the siren of the police car in our bystreet took me quickly to the explosion scene near Hamra Hotel. I quickly hugged my son and asked my wife to hold our daughter. My wife asked me "why are you so nervous?" I answered her "if you saw part of what I had seen yesterday, you would even more."