Jane Arraf's Notebook:

Bomb hits Baghdad hotel popular with foreign journalists

BAGHDAD, Iraq — The boom of a car bomb is unmistakable and chilling. Almost worse are the expressions on the faces of Iraqis in the immediate aftermath. The set jaw and the cold stare of people wondering where the enemy has come from.

Near the Hamra hotel on Monday, Iraqis and Westerners hugged friends and near-strangers uninjured in the bombings. The icy stares were from residents of nearby houses living through the second major bombing of a hotel popular with foreign journalists. Many of those journalists moved here as a safer alternative to the Palestine, the hotel of choice at the beginning of the war. That hotel was hit by a U.S. tank round in 2003 and later rocketed. On Monday, the second of three car bombs exploded near the Palestine. There are no safe places.

A U.S. Army officer came by looking for Americans who needed help — they would have arrived sooner but Iraqi security had closed the roads and they were caught in the same traffic jams as Iraqis were.

Baghdad last summer seemed like a much safer place than it’s been in the last few years. Families began to go out at night — new restaurants and shops opened up. On Monday, one of those restaurants in a small hotel next to the Hamra was a tangle of broken furniture and shattered glass. In the same compound, at another small hotel which the owner was in the midst of lovingly renovating, the fresh red paint framed empty windows — the imploded glass in fragments. I picked the glass off the furniture in my room and thought about how lucky I and my staff had been.

It had seemed safer until Aug. 19 — the anniversary of the bombing of U.N. headquarters here six years before. Last August, that anniversary was marked by attacks on the Foreign and Finance ministries. Those suicide truck bombs were followed by coordinated attacks on government installations in August and in December, killing hundreds of people. With the ministries increasingly fortified, the hotels were likely an easier target, one military official suggested. But by no means the last of the targets in a country where violence has receded but is never far away.

An Iraqi police officer examines wreckage after a suicide car bomb near Baghdad's Hamra hotel. (Jane Arraf/GlobalPost)

Five killed and 16 wounded in the coordinated bombings in Baghdad

BAGHDAD — It was just before 7:30 in the morning as Western and Iraqi reporters waited outside Haider's Double Falafel shop on Tuesday that the car bomb exploded. One of three that morning, this was in a parking lot near the Green Zone, close enough to shake the cars we were in but not powerful enough to shatter the glass. Five people were killed and 16 wounded in the coordinated bombings all before most Iraqis began their day.

When the U.S. organizes press events, it has reporters meet them in the green zone. When the Iraqi government organizes them, the meeting point is a falafel shop. Both methods have their own challenges. Walking to the relative safety of the Green Zone with billowing black smoke overhead, the sound of sirens competed with the random gunfire. On mornings like this, the green zone is only a haven for those already inside. The entrance was choked with parliamentary officials and others barred by Iraqi soldiers at the gate from entering. Parliament has been holding hearings all week on the security breaches in Baghdad.

"The Americans won't let us in," said one Iraqi employee in the crowd. I asked a U.S. soldier going out to take a look why no one was being allowed in. "The Iraqis control the entrance," he pointed out.

Another of the bombs exploded in a parking lot across from the Foreign Ministry, where a huge suicide truck bomb in August killed dozens of people and sent buildings across the street tumbling down. A long, shiny trail of blood glistened in the deserted street.

"There's supposed to be another car bomb here that hasn't exploded — that's what the police tell us," said a ministry guard in the street. I asked him if he wasn't afraid. 'Why should I be afraid?" he responded, whipping off his sunglasses. "I am Kurdish. We are used to this."

The buses arranged for reporters showed up an hour late and took the remaining reporters who hadn't chosen the somewhat safer of their own cars to Camp Ashraf, the home of 3,500 Iranian dissidents an hour north of Baghdad.

This was the day the Iraqi government had chosen to give the residents notice that they were shutting down the camp — a decision that Iran has been pressing them for for over a year. With a second car bomb exploding near the Iranian embassy, the timing of the attacks wasn't likely a coincidence. Iraq is still a turbulent mix.

Obama's speech: The view from Baghdad

At a small hotel in Baghdad's Judriyah district, generator mechanic Ali Ghazi sat watching President Obama's speech on a TV screen in the lobby as he smoked cigarettes. "Everything America does is important — it holds Iraq in its hands," he said. Others in the lobby ignored the speech.

Ghazi, who has no shortage of work in a city with hours a day of electrical power cuts, said despite Obama's assurances on the withdrawal of U.S. troops, he believed that the U.S. and Iraqi officials had secret deals that would allow American soldiers to stay in some areas.

On the al-Arabiya network the television was tuned to, warnings from Osama Bin Laden that an alliance between Muslims, Christians and Jews would hurt the Muslim faith ran at the bottom of the screen as Obama spoke.

Ghazi, 48, said he had no problem with the U.S. reaching out to the Muslim world. "'The world is built on interests," he said. "Enemies one minute can be friends the next."

Iraq redefines itself with peaceful elections

BAQUBA, Iraq: On voting day as Iraqis went to the polls, the world saw purple fingers raised in a sign of victory over violence. Behind those images is a country still defining itself, where rocket-propelled grenades and tanks stationed near polling sites help oversee Iraq's halting steps towards democracy.

In 2005, I watched nervous election officials in Baquba stay up all night counting ballots at a hangar in a U.S. Army base. Although publicly the U.S. wasn't involved in Iraqi elections, it was the only place the Iraqi election commission was confident they wouldn't be attacked.

That was a country under U.S. occupation. Four years later, with the status of forces agreement in December that turned U.S. forces into invited guests, the relationship is supposed to be one of cooperation.

With almost 400 non-Iraqi monitors, this was one of the most heavily observed elections in the Middle East. But it's a big country.

As I set off with U.N. and U.S. election monitors from Tel Afar in a convoy of M-Raps — just a few steps down from a tank — the Marine gunny gave a safety brief that included a sobering reminder of the potential perils on the road to democracy in north-Western Iraq.

"If anything happens and we can identify the target we'll stop and take him out," he said matter-of-factly.

This is territory under Iraqi government control but coveted by the Kurds, who say they have a historical claim to it. While the Marines kept watch for insurgents, at brief stops at polling stations, monitors watched for signs of intimidation and voting irregularities. There was nothing though on their checklist specifically for election officials stopping the voting to have lunch, or people going behind the screen insisting that their sisters and wives couldn't vote for themselves. These are communities where a lot of the voters can't read the ballots — they leave a finger-print in lieu of signing their name.

No one seemed fazed by the dozens of Iraqi soldiers and police near each school that served at a polling station, backed by U.S. soldiers and marines at the outer perimeters. At one intersection a U.S. tank was perched on a hill — its turret pointed towards the polling station.

At another polling site, approval from the civilian election official to allow photographs was overturned by a 22-year-old Iraqi police lieutenant — making it clear who was in charge. "There are terrorists here who will come and kill people," he said. Asked about the last time there was a terrorist attack in what has become a significantly calmer region, he said he couldn't talk about it.

At another it seemed to be tribal officials in charge — when a police officer told them he had approved taking photographs, he was told sharply: "The police don't matter." For a minute it seemed as if a fist-fight would break out.

In one polling center, voting seemed to have been suspended to allow the election workers inside to eat lunch — platters of rice and lamb and small glasses of sugary tea. The only workers not eating were the three women inside a pop-up tent who had been paid $5 each to search women voters for the day. One was breast-feeding her six-month-old daughter. She had six others at home and a husband who made $40 a month as a part-time guard. None of them had voted or saw the point.

At the entrance to the school turned polling station, an Iraqi soldier lounged on a bench with a rocket-propelled grenade at his feet. They are not government-issue. The police have long argued that they need weapons at least as powerful as those they are fighting and in some places they go out and get it or take it themselves.

"Do you want to buy it?" he joked. "How much?" he was asked. "Only insurgents know the price."

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