Around 11pm Ben came home and I asked him if he wanted to play the trivia game Alex, Lydia and I had devised. Instead of answering my question he said there was a huge fire and he hoped it wasn't our office building. I told Lydia (the photographer) and naturally she wanted to go find it. So with her camera in hand Alex, Lydia and I set off towards the smoke. We soon found that it was not our office building but a hotel just a few hundred feet away.
Hotel Soma has 62 rooms and 60 of them were booked tonight. Since Sulaimania has cooler weather than the south, many Arabs come for vacation. Also, judging from the bodies we saw on stretchers as they were wheeled frantically into the ambulances there were some Asian and possibly Bangladeshi people in the hotel. The Bangladeshi man we saw particularly concerns me because in our building we have a very sweet man from Bangladesh who is essentially a custodian. He is a victim of human trafficking and lives in extremely unacceptable conditions at the top of our building. He has friends, in the same situation, who work at Hotel Soma who would presumably also stay at the very top of their building making it extremely difficult to escape during a fire.
When we arrived there were large crowds of people surrounding the building. Included in those crowds were lots of police in blue uniforms, Iraqi secret police (Asaish) in army looking uniforms, and eventually riot police in black uniforms with big shields. A man told me that three people had jumped out of windows. Chinese, he siad. There were firefighters in buckets in the sky attempting to put out the fire which seemed to have been mainly in the hotel's restaurant and lounge. The entire front of the hotel is glass and all the windows on the second floor where the fire seemed to be were busted out. Meanwhile, there were men in buckets going to windows where guests were trapped inside. They were punching out window after window looking for people. We saw someone get pulled from a lower level room who seemed to be conscious. On the 8th or 9th story there was a blanket dangling from the window. Someone was trying to signal that they were trapped. Eventually, a limp body of a young woman was pulled out. But the bucket wasn't close enough to the building for them to easily get her in. So the guy in the building was holding her lower body as her upper body just hung, long black hair streaming, 8 or 9 stories up. Alex and I both thought they were going to drop her. I thought I was going to see a body fall from hundreds of feet and land in a huge pile of glass on the ground. Instead they somehow got her into the bucket and her legs flopped so unnaturally as they hung out the side. We saw two other people who were probably also dead but I like to think just unconscious from smoke damage. Their bodies flopped on the stretchers as the paramedics hastily tried to shove them into the ambulances.
One of the angrier sounding police officers seemed to be yelling, "Don't any of you care what's going on here? Back up! Be more respectful! It's shameful for you to stand here and stare! What's wrong with you people?" Many people seemed to just be quite curious as to what was going on and wanted to see the spectacle. Even I felt like I should be more horrified than I was at what was happening right in front of me. All of those windows they were breaking through and rooms they were searching were only half of the building. There was a whole other half that at a little past midnight when we left hadn't really been explored yet. Who knows how many people were stuck back in those rooms unconscious with smoke filled lungs.
All the while, Alex and I are trying to figure out where Lydia is. Every once in a while we see her bop in and out of the police and other officials. She was past all the police tape, next to the fire trucks, men yelling commands and police tazering bystanders. Later she told us that for a good while no one even noticed she was really there. There was too much commotion. I met one guy to told me he had seen her around. Our main concern was how close she was to all the glass falling from 7 stories up. At one point someone asked me if we were staying there. I said no but my friend is over there in the middle taking pictures. The man thought I meant she was in the building. He said to me, "Oh maybe she is dead." When I retold the story to Alex he said perhaps with the language barrier the man wasn't sure how to choose his words any more carefully.
Later when we were reunited with Lydia and talking with her newfound friend Ross from the UK, he remarked to her that what was happening must have been like what 9/11 was like. She said, No.
Lydia also recounted what she had seen on the other side of the chaos where she was taking photos. Below the hotel there are two large stores. Two women who seemed to be the owners of the stores had arrived and quickly became extremely upset. They were trying to go in the stores and grab all the things they could. The Asaish were trying to fight the women back and then the crowd was getting angry that the Asaish wouldn't let the women get their things. Lydia said one Asaish just grabbed a guy by the throat and threw him to the ground. Then the tazers came out. When she told the story she asked if we had heard the ominous zapping sounds. We hadn't yet. Lydia said when she realized it wasn't acceptable for her to be in the middle of everything anymore it was when the riot police guys wouldn't stop making eye contact with her and holding their tazers. In this culture eye contact means business so Lydia backed off.
The three of us continued to watch as stretchers flew in and out, ambulances screeched and wailed and police attempted to control crowds. Then I learned what tazers sounded like. I've never felt more like an animal than when I was scrambling to get away from a tazer who's location I was not entirely sure of. That crackling of electricity was loud and sounded painful. I am not about to get myself tazed. After a few rounds of threatening zaps and a few more rounds of the police man barging through the tape I thought was safe to be behind we figured it was time to go home. Lydia wanted to upload all her photos, I had a headache from the smoke and we had just seen enough to scramble our senses for a while.
Earlier this week I was thinking how glad I was that no tragedy like the plane crash in Moshi had happened while I was here in Iraq. I should have known that things like this come out of nowhere. One minute you're writing silly trivia questions and soon after you're seeing a body dangling from a very high window. It's a wonder we're all not terrified of what could happen at any second.
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