In a second, a bomb destroys one man’s dream of reopening his Baghdad hotel

BAGHDAD, Iraq — When a series of bombings ripped across Baghdad on Friday night targeting crowded street corners, cafes and a nightclub, the Hamurabi Hotel wound up caught in the crossfire.

Shuttered for more than 10 years, the building — once a dusty time capsule of life in Iraq before car bombs and sectarian violence became a daily feature — is now shattered. The lobby and front steps were still littered with fragments of turquoise glass the morning after the attack.

By Baghdad’s standards, the attacks Friday night had relatively low death tolls: government officials say in total 26 people were killed and more than 50 injured. At least six of those killed died outside Farig’s hotel, on streets packed in the evenings with restaurant-goers and pedestrians.

But in addition to the lives lost, each bombing brings with it smaller tragedies: businesses destroyed, hopes crushed and lives put on hold.

“All of this building’s design was inspired by Iraq’s past,” explained Ghanim Farig, the hotel's owner, who happened to be inside the building when the blast struck.

Slowly walking around the lobby, Farig pointed to the blown-out windows, sofa cushions and matching wall paint. “The blue, that’s from the Gates of Babylon,” he said.

The original gates of ancient Babylon, long since eroded and pillaged by colonial archaeologists, remain a powerful symbol of Iraq’s rich heritage. Their image adorns everything from key chains to coffee mugs. Saddam Hussein rebuilt a garish version of the gates in the 1980s, which reopened to tourists in 2010 and attracted thousands of Iraqis from all over the country before security concerns kept people away.

Farig first opened the doors of the Hamurabi Hotel in 1979, just as Hussein formally rose to power and the country’s economy was experiencing an oil revenue boom. The hotel attracted guests from all over the world.

A row of stopped clocks showing the time in New York, Cairo, France and England hung in the rubble-strewn reception area on Saturday, beside a bar still stocked with dusty bottles of Johnnie Walker.

Farig had hoped to reopen the hotel, but the damage has made his dream even less likely. As he spoke, workers were arriving with plywood to board up broken windows. 

His clothing still dirty from the debris kicked up by the blast, he said he was talking on the phone with his brother in San Diego as the bomb hit the night before.

“I was standing right here,” he explained, pointing to the cafe area just off the lobby that bore the brunt of the blast. “Thank God I had just walked around the corner before the attack, just ten minutes and I would have been dead.”

Hamurabi Hotel owner Ghanim Farig holds part of an old hotel stationary set in one of the building's upstairs rooms. (Susannah George/GlobalPost)

After closing briefly during the Gulf War, the Hamurabi was shuttered more permanently in 2004 as violence following the US-led invasion of Iraq began targeting establishments frequented by Westerners. Unlike Western hotels that have continued to operate in Baghdad despite unrest, the Hamurabi’s main entrance sits directly on the street, unprotected by a fortress of blast walls and checkpoints.

One of the reasons he closed his hotel 10 years ago was to avoid attacks like the one on Friday night, Farig said.

Over the past month, car bombs in Iraq have struck at a steady, deadly pace. In the past week there have been 10 such attacks. While there are few claims of responsibility, Islamic State (IS) militants often use car bombs to target majority Shia neighborhoods in Baghdad.

The rise of IS in Iraq and the increase in violence that has come with it is destroying livelihoods and pulverizing an already struggling economy. Foreign investors are being scared off, trade is declining and large areas of agricultural land have been lost in IS-controlled areas. 

More checkpoints and an increased militia presence in the capital have done little to stop the attacks. While the Iraqi government calls for more airstrikes and heavy weaponry to fight IS militants on the front lines in Anbar and Diyala provinces — and anxiety grows about the possibility IS militants could take Baghdad — for many Iraqis living in the capital, the war has already come to them.

“I just don’t understand,” Farig said. “Why did they target me? There wasn’t even anyone here.”