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On Easter Sunday, as I was getting ready to go on an egg hunt with my wife and two boys, suicide bombers struck at half a dozen churches and hotels across Sri Lanka. The first reports indicated many people had been killed. I live in New Delhi, India, and I’m the bureau chief of this region. Within an hour or so, it was clear that I needed to go.
You might think this would happen more often in our business, that we foreign correspondents have a bag hanging from a hook in our office and a wad of cash and passport all lined up and we are accustomed to some huge news event upending our lives. But I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I’ve never gotten used to it. These moments always fill me with dread, this cold, spreading, uncomfortable realization that my life is connected to the most miserable things that can happen to others, and I’ve never felt excited about leaving my family to jump off into the bottomless void of some huge story. No matter how important it is, I always wish it never happened and that I could just stay home.
I spent the next hours in a low level panic, the acid rising in my throat, trying to write different versions of a news story though my fingers weren’t cooperating and felt thick. My mind was so divided that when I yanked open the sock drawer I stood paralyzed for a few moments, unable to decide which ones to take. Like any of this matters, I said to myself. But still, I couldn’t decide.
It was in this completely stressed out state that I arrived several hours later in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital. My disquiet and stress were nothing compared to what people here were suffering. In the first days after these attacks, there was some doubt about who did this. The Sri Lankan authorities initially believed the attacks were the work of an obscure homegrown Islamist group with possible foreign connections. Walking up to that church erased any doubts I had. The high cathedral ceiling had been blow off and red roofing tiles lay scattered everywhere. All around me, the walls had been drilled by shrapnel, and blood was splattered 20 feet high.
Standing there, I had a flashback: The headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. Erbil, Iraq, 2004. That was the first suicide bombing I covered and I’ll never be able to forget it. Al Qaeda agents had planned the attack to happen during a busy Muslim holiday. The carnage was devastating. Never before did I appreciate how fragile we are as human beings, no match for the forces of physics. People are not supposed to be smeared across walls like flies. I stepped into that room as one person. I came out as another.
Whoever built the bomb that tore through St. Sebastian’s Church had a similar expertise to the bombmakers in Iraq. The initial reports said one man, with a backpack, had walked into the Easter Mass. I knew that only an experienced bombmaker — an experienced mass murderer — could have packed so much explosive into a relatively small device.
In recent days, more evidence, like the presence of the explosive TATP, has emerged linking the Sri Lanka attacks to the Islamic State. That organization might seem so far away and abstract. But the point that the Islamic State clearly wanted to make, not so much in Sri Lanka but through Sri Lanka, was that no matter where you are or what you’re doing, you are never safe.
Source : Nytimes
