Basra

The evening started well enough, with a fruit cocktails on the lawn, followed by dinner with our special guest. No more than twenty minutes after we had moved inside, an explosion blasted open one of the thrid floor rooms and showered the lawn with shattered glass. Large pieces of the window frame were found embedded in a metal fence over 140 feet from the hotel. Apart from one individual who was smoking a cigarette outside, who was hit by a small fragment of glass, no one was injured. My PSD thought that we had been hot by a mortar and left dinner to check the hotel’s roof. He reported back that there was no sign of a mortar and suggested I went upstairs to see how close the blast had been to my room. Luckily, my room was undamged, but could only be entered by climbing over a samll pile of rubble.