(2 of 5)
At the site of the explosion, the air was quickly filled with the sickly sweet odor of burning human flesh. The walls of the shrine saved thousands of worshippers inside, but those outside felt the full force of the blast. Charred victims were strewn across the narrow lane, some still alive, if only barely. The injured ran, stumbled or crawled away, blood spouting from their wounds. A man leaned against a burning car, his clothes incinerated and strips of skin hanging from his elbows and knees. As rescuers tried to guide him to safety, it became clear that the flesh on his back had melted and fused to the paint of the car. He was ripped off the car, laid down on a jury-rigged stretcher--a sheet of cloth pulled from the wreckage of a fabric shop--and hurried away by four men.
The bolts of fabric from the shop came in handy. By the time the first fire truck roared up, barely 10 minutes after the blast, at least a dozen shrouds had been fashioned from the cloth. One of them, made of polyester, caught an ember and began to blaze, blackening the body underneath it. Two of the rescuers turned away to throw up. Handcarts were pressed into service as makeshift hearses. The fire truck hosed the cars down. A puddle gathered in the crater, and rescuers turned plastic iceboxes into makeshift scoops to take the water out of the crater and use it to douse small fires in the wreckage of the shops.
Even before the first ambulances arrived on the scene, speculation about the perpetrators began. "This is the revenge of Saddam Hussein," sobbed a young man as he helped cover a charred corpse with a bloodstained sheet. Bystanders shouted anti-Saddam slogans. Then an elderly man in a red fez, which identified him as a member of the shrine staff, screamed, "Not Saddam, by God, but the Wahhabis! They are the enemies of the Shi'as!" The accusation against the austere, fundamentalist sect of Islam was taken up by the rapidly growing crowd. Quickly abuse was aimed at Osama bin Laden; for many Iraqis, Wahhabism and al-Qaeda are interchangeable.
As another body was clawed from the rubble, the cursing gave way to the sober recitation of the Islamic creed, a customary courtesy for the dead: "There is no God but Allah." As the body count climbed, the words were repeated again and again. An hour after the blast, the search had assumed a semblance of order, and the volunteer rescue workers, their fingers bleeding from their barehanded digging, chanted the creed almost continuously. For a moment, all thoughts of al-Qaeda and Saddam were banished. Then came word that a group of "Wahhabis" had been spotted in a hotel half a mile down the road. A small contingent of U.S. soldiers made an appearance but stayed a few blocks away. Shouting angrily, some men peeled away from the crowd and sprinted toward the hote. By the time they got there, two men in Afghan-style clothing had been cornered by a small mob and were being slapped and shoved around.