I will never complain about a bad cellphone signal again. It saved my life this week.
A suicide bomber had just walked past me and blew himself up in an Iraqi police station moments after I ducked round a corner to try for a better connection to the Reuters bureau in Baghdad.
Two policemen and a four-year-old girl were killed, while I survived unscathed to witness the awful carnage left behind.
It barely merited a mention in the news on a day when dozens of other Iraqis died, including 28 in a bombing in Baghdad. But October 30 is a day I will never forget.
It had started out quite normally. As a Reuters reporter in Kirkuk, my home town and Iraq’s northern oil capital, I had stopped by one of the main police stations to talk to a contact.
Kirkuk is a violent and dangerous place, where ethnic Kurds, Arabs and Turkish-speaking Turkmen are contesting control of the oilfields. But inside the high concrete walls of the police compound I felt reasonably safe. It’s like being in a fortress.
As I came out of the senior officer’s building clutching a press release, I began dialling the Baghdad bureau with the news. At the other end, my colleague Ahmed Rasheed could not hear me properly. The concrete barriers were disrupting the signal.
I looked for a better position to try to get through again.
I didn’t know then but that move meant I survived what came next. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. People were coming in through the police station’s security checks and going out.
As I was finishing my call to Ahmed, I remember watching a policeman walking across the yard to where some other officers were standing. I looked away. Then the world collapsed.
I heard a huge explosion and the ground shook beneath my feet. I fell to the ground and shattered glass fell all around me. I heard a policeman screaming.
After I picked myself up, still very dazed, I went over and saw what seemed to be the remains of the bomber. It was half a torso and a pair of legs — wearing a police uniform.
I smelled burnt flesh and realised the bomber had been the man I thought was a policeman walking across the yard.
He had looked like an ordinary policeman. He had been calm. There had been nothing weird about him. He had passed through the security checks and the reception area. He didn’t have a beard like many Islamist militants.
A man carried a little girl in his arms, shouting for an ambulance. She lay still. I found out later she was dead. Two policemen were also killed in the explosion.
I staggered out, heading home, and ran into a fellow journalist. ”I can’t believe you’re still alive,” he yelled.
After what had happened, I almost didn’t believe it myself. ‒ Reuters