It was a two car-bomb morning. The first, around 7.30 am, shook the press centre. We’re close to the Red Zone (in fact, some call this area the Orange Zone) and the explosion sounded like it was just outside the walls. I heard the second explosion while conducting an interview at the Rusafa prison and court complex in central Baghdad. According to an early news report, the bomb was placed under a parked car near downtown and killed four people.
James Geoghegan, the public affairs officer at the complex, told me how to distinguish a car-bomb from a mortar. A mortar, he says, sounds like a crash, like someone dropped a trailer from the sky. A car bomb explosion has a deeper timbre, a throbbing boom that you feel in your chest. These are the kinds of impromptu conversations one has here.
