…Tai, short with round glasses, was leaving a bank after collecting his pension when the car bomb detonated. “It was a huge explosion,” he said, as ambulances carrying the injured sped past. “My head and face were full of dust and ash from the burning books.”
Imad Abbas, 39, a burly man with thinning hair, was in his stationery shop when he heard the explosion. Shelves and boxes fell on his head, he recalled. The electricity went off. Outside, a car burned. Then his store caught fire.
He ran upstairs to the balcony and began shouting for help. Fifteen minutes later, he was rescued by firemen. One of them placed Abbas on his back and carried him down, depositing him near a corpse covered with a blanket.
“I just returned from the dead,” Abbas said.
When Saddam Hussein was in power, Mutanabi Street exuded a defiant spirit that reverberated through its bookstores and the famed Shabandar Cafe. Here, intellectuals, over cups of sweet tea, engaged in lively debates.
But in recent months, the street had become a casualty of Iraq’s incessant violence. As thousands of educated Iraqis left, many of the original booksellers closed shop. Others were kidnapped or killed. Many fled the country. Checkpoints, street closings and a Friday curfew kept customers away.
Still, the street was a hive of activity in the mornings, mostly because of a brisk trade in stationery products. Abbas said he believes that’s why the street was attacked.
“They want to drive down the trade of Iraq,” he said of the perpetrators. “They are trying to humiliate our history and humiliate our people.”
washingtonpost.com
