Dahab bombing '06

Dahab bombing

April 28th, 2006 by abossone

Don’t worry, I’m safe and sound.
I got a phone call the night of the bombing and I left Cairo around 10pm. I slept about an hour in the car and arrived at 7am. There was blood and broken glass everywhere.
The first tourist I spoke with told me about a wedding the night before in his hotel. I spent the rest of the day tracking down the couple that was the lead in my story.

I shared my notes with my roommate and he wrote a story which was published in the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times. My name was at the bottom of it, but it was spelled wrong (Andrew Bassone)

Here’s the unedited version of what I wrote for the magazine, which they didn’t pick up, so I’m selling it to someone else:

Three devastating terrorist bombs in Dahab could not stop Anak Aldin and Kerstin Aldin-Hellman from getting married. Their wedding was scheduled at 8 o’clock at the Jasmine Restaurant, 45 minutes after the bombs exploded. They still held the wedding, albeit a couple of hours late, and under the most extraordinary of circumstances.

“When the bomb went off I was in the Bedouin camp doing make up and fixing hair,” says Kerstin, 27, from Sweden. “I asked the women around me about it and they said, ‘Don’t worry,’ and then [Anak] called a few minutes later and said, ‘are you alright—we’ll come get you,’ and the phone lines were busy so I didn’t hear anything after that.”

“Everyone was going this way and I had to go that way,” says Anak, a former fisherman from Iceland, 39. “I couldn’t get there and the driver said, ‘Everything is working out, it’s the Egyptian way.’ After one hour and a half I thought, ‘it’s not ok.’”

Instead of riding camels from the desert to the Red Sea, they walked hand in hand through the town as cars passed by—full of tourists escaping the tragedy. She wore a traditional Bedouin dress, with her hair twisted up in braids and her arms and legs covered in henna tattoos, while people fleeing the town stared at her and her groom .

“I walked to find her. I came there and I found this goddess. And we walked back—and I though t, ‘I have to go [to the site of the bomb,]’” says Anak. “I said, ‘alhumdulillah, I’m getting married.’”

Police did not let them enter the barricaded site of the bombs, so they continued through the emptying streets on their way to the Jasmine Hotel, located on the other side of town. Meanwhile, Gamal El Din, manager of the hotel, waited with coworkers for the couple to arrive.

“We thought [the first bomb] was a gas explosion. It was quite small at first,” says El Din, 22. “We all ran [to the bomb site] and then the second and third happened. We saw a lot of people die. I came back and I was very shocked. I saw heads without bodies or some bodies without a stomach. I couldn’t stay long.”

The hotel staff had arranged everything for the wedding. The restaurant was decorated, the music was organized, and a video photographer was booked. Instead, the staff wore solemn faces, the music was cancelled, and the photographer never showed.

The couple met only three weeks before coming to Dahab, on April 1st. They fell in love immediately and decided to take a vacation shortly thereafter.

“We looked into each other in the eyes, heart to heart; you just know. We’ve been together since then 24hours a day. We started talking and we just said, ‘How should we get married?’ It wasn’t, ‘should we get married; it was how should we get married?” says Kerstin.

They agreed to get married while eating dinner one night at the Penguin. “We were at the restaurant. Allah decided, my heart decided,” says Anak.

The couple did not have any friends or family in Dahab, but invited everyone they met in town. “People started talking about the clothes and the make up. We let the people organize for the dinner and we invited all the people we know. The chef came and said, ‘we can fix a goat for you.’ They made Bedouin food. It was a big ceremony. They worked all night making the food,” says Kerstin.

When they finally arrived, the staff was ecstatic. It was the only highlight in an otherwise heart wrenching evening. El Din brought a lawyer to make the contract and complete the marriage. “There was going to be big party, but the music wasn’t playing after that. We stopped everything, but we wanted to make them happy. “

“The bombing will not stop love. This is the way of Allah. The thing I can see out of all of is to open the heart, believe in love and don’t doubt. That will affect the town,” says Anak.

The town was eerily quiet the morning after the explosions that killed 21 and injured 85. After sunrise, several journalists were setting up cameras and taking photos of the shards of glass on the ground and stains of blood that had only recently dried.

There was so much blood and glass that people were standing in piles without even noticing them. Within a few hours, workers began pouring soapy water on the blood and scrubbed away the remnants.

A few doors down from the worst explosion, Mahmoud Abbas, the manager of the Spicy Man spice
and oil store, was standing outside his shop. Only five minutes before the first bomb went off the night before, he served a customer from France. He was filling out paperwork for the order when he heard the first bomb. He saw people running down the street and he followed. He felt the next two bombs rattle his body.

“My God gave me a new life,” he says.

As tears nearly filled up his eyes, he recalled a friend that died 10 meters in front of his shop.

The bombs went off in the center of town, at 7:15pm, right as people were going out for dinner and shopping after a day at the beach. Each bomb exploded one after the other, all within a few hundred meters.

Abbas does not know what he will do next; the shop was destroyed in the blast. He worries tourism will be ruined. Either way, he has decided to stay. Other Dahab residents have mixed feelings about what will happen to tourism, the economic lifeblood of the town. Although the exodus was quick, many people decided to stay. Some of the hotels were still near full capacity.

“No one left, says El Din. “Our guests mostly live in Cairo. But four reservations didn’t come.”

“They never go to Dahab and not come back. Some people come nine or ten times. I don’t think new people will come now. A lot of people left today. Three big buses in the morning took people to travel, which is more than usual,” he says.

The Penguin Hotel, where Anak and his wife were staying, lost about 15% of their customers.

“Four left just because,” says Mohamed Inab, manager. “Some people just panicked. Two just arrived and left in a few hours. I tried to calm them down and tell them it’s safe now but they have an 8-year-old boy. We appreciate that [other guests] stayed. But they understand. They tell us, ‘If I ride a bus in London or Paris, that can happen.’ Tomorrow people are taking an excursion in a jeep in the desert.”

Inab expected tourism to go down anyway, since there is usually a dip in the summer. The town recovered quickly from the terrorist attack in Sharm El Sheik last July, as hotels were full in January, a few months later. But no one really knows what the long-term effects will be.

“One year from now [tourism] will be less. June was supposed to be slow. The World Cup comes soon, which is good because it will help people forget,” he says.

Nine guests from the Penguin Hotel were injured, three Egyptians and six foreigners. Three were seriously wounded and two of those were from Egypt. The last Inab heard, they were transferred from a hospital in Sharm El Sheik to Cairo.

“There’s no good hospital in Dahab. The hospital is very bad, so on the way to Sharm they probably died. There is only one car for the hospital; the rest [transporting injured people] were service cars,” says El Din.

If any attack or accident ever happened again, Inab says the government has to do something to address the lack of health care in town. Inab also says there needs to be better checkpoints on the roads and security in town.

“Security is doing nothing,” Inab says at his hotel, far from the site of the blasts.

Tourism Terror

It was apparent that the attack had the specific intent of disrupting tourism. There is very little in Dahab not connected to tourism, if anything at all. The bombs went off at the most active time of day, in the most crowded area and on one of the busiest days of the year.

"This incident is addressed to the whole of Egypt, there is no reason for it other than an attempt to destroy the economy of Egypt by attacking tourism," said Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif outside a hospital in a Sharm el-Sheik, where many of the victims were treated.

This bombing presents yet another challenge for the Egyptian government. In this year alone the cabinet has dealt with bird flu, the ferryboat accident in the Red Sea and now this.

Like the other two bombings on the Sinai Peninsula, this one was on a national holiday that brings extra tourists. The bomb in Taba and Ras Shitan that killed 34 in October 2004 was the day before a holiday to mark the start of the1973 Arab-Israeli war. The bomb in Sharm El Sheik last July 23 that killed 64 people was on Egypt National Day. The explosion in Dahab went off hours before the Sinai Liberation Day and also a day after the Coptic Easter.

“For two years, Sinai has been a target. Four tourist towns were hit; there’s no other towns left,” says Inab.

The next day, another attack hit the town of Arish, also in Sinai. Nobody was hurt at the UN peacekeeping compound where it occurred.

While there could be any number of reasons that Sinai is a specific target for killings, Inab thinks that impact of the blast goes beyond taking lives. It will have the effect of preventing foreigners from interacting with locals, which fosters understanding among different groups of people. This is especially the case in Dahab, where the locals build friendships with visitors. They often sit in the seaside cafes with their guests and call them “brother.”

A group of young people sat on the shoulders of their friends the morning after the blast and shouted, “We love everyone!” Later, people in a parade through town chanted, “We love tourists!”

“[The terrorists] don’t want to just hurt people, but they want to control the minds of foreigners by attracting bad media attention,” Inab says. “The media is the only way to control the mind. If you can’t go to a place then you have to listen to the media.”

In the armpit of an Egyptian giant

It was an interesting Sunday. I didn’t have anything in my planner, and I’d hoped to stop by the office and do some writing (in addition to picking up my sunglasses that I left last week and a copy of this month’s magazine, which I haven’t read yet). On my way to the office I was sidetracked by a visit to a Sudanese man I ran into a few days ago at a bar. He met me at the train station and I bought some small peaches and cantelopes while I waited for him. We crossed the bridge over the train tracks because I didn’t understand that was where I was supposed to meet him.

As we walked to his apartment, the conversation was mostly about how the Egyptian authorities keep tabs on him and hawk him about everything he does. He said that he doesn’t trust anyone, not even other Sudanese, who he said are the ones telling the police his whereabouts.

We went up to his apartment and a woman living in the building was questioning him about me. She said, "Who is he? Who is this guy you are with? Why is he here?" As I deciphered in my head what she was saying in Arabic, the Sudanase guy explained that I am an American who is friends with his flatmate, a doctor.

We chatted for a bit in his bedroom and sipped on tea. He gave me two CDs with video from the protest in Mustafa Mahmoud. I gave him two of the peaches I bought. He showed me his tattered yellow refugee card, issued more than two years ago as a temporary application for refugee status determination until UNHCR approves him for a more permenant blue card. His story is like many Sudanese. He fled his country for a thousand reasons and fears a return will lead to imprisonment, conscription and/or death.

Two of his friends arrived. One named Andrew, but he could never be confused a short white guy like me. Sweat was beading along his hairline and pieces of white tissue stuck to the side of his face as he blotted off the droplets. They showed me some pictures and I told them about my difficulties getting a Sudanese visa.

They are wanderers in Cairo. Without a job and a permenant home, they migrate from place to place. They can’t afford to maintain a regular residence so they rent out beds and rooms in modestly-furnished apartments. They move around so the authorities don’t always know where they’ll be. They were both eager and cautious to give me the disks with video of Sudanese refugees in Cairo. They trust me; they welcome me into their world. I don’t worry for myself; but I fear that they will be questioned for talking to me.

I left the apartment with the intention to meet them tonight at a cafe downtown where I have seen several Sudanese hang out. I decided not to go to the office. I picked up the next train home to burn copies of the video.

The train was more crowded than usual. One of the doors didn’t open fully and I didn’t notice that a man pushed up against the doorway had somehow lodged his forearm between the handle and the wall. He grimaced in pain until about three of us pulled the doors shut so he could get free and then we quickly boarded. I caught the train a few stops closer to home, which at the time seemed like the reason for the full car. I was still about 6 stops from the Sadat station, so I hoped some people would get off on the way back.

Cairo is warming up now, the winter is long gone, the spring rains have
certainly passed, and the sun is heating the mornings earlier. I looked around and noticed the man across from me was sweating profusely. The fans mounted to the walls weren’t spinning, and each station brought more passengers, not less.

One stop away from the main station, one of the few with a transfer, the car was about to explode. For most of the ride, my front, sides and back leaned against someone else. I had been continually pushed until I was now against side door. The wind shooting through the space between my car and the one behind me was like gushes from a cool oxygen tank. I looked up and saw the tallest Egyptian man I have ever seen holding his arms above my head onto the wall behind me. He stood in an akward Gumby pose, curled and bent, and the loose sleeves of his blue-green tee shirt were closer to my head than his skinny arms.

When the doors opened many passengers rushed out aggressively. I was the last of the herd to make it to the promised land, and the small pocket that had formed in front of the opening was closing fast. I tucked my arms in, put my head down, and volleyed through a sea of arms and bodies like a
pinball bouncing off rubber stumps.

I never looked so happily up the stairs of the metro into dusty beams of sunlight as I did today.

Passing Thoughts

Some of my recent thoughts/events:

The standards of journalism in this country, like its economy, is developing slowly. I’m not going to get into specifics because complaints about people could end up getting me in trouble. But I will say that there aren’t the same rules when it comes to receiving gifts, making promises and fully disclosing information. I didn’t accept any gifts, make unethical promises or falsify any reporting personally, but there is just a lot of leeway about what you can and can’t do. It’s a struggle sometimes to assert myself as a professional with integrity, but I suppose it can be good to learn the rules of the game in a place that has lax rules because it forces me to use my better judgement. Basically there’s no Poynter Institute to talk about that stuff here. But this is a good article in the Christian Science Monitor about when a journalist should help starving/sick/suffering in Africa.

I have a new roommate, Matt Ford. He goes to Medill and is doing an internship with the AP like I did in the fall. He’s a nice guy and we have good conversations about journalism, politics, and then regular bullshit too. He’s quite the multimedia guru, so I’m hoping he can teach me some stuff and help me set up a website. If I ever get a visa to Sudan, I think he’ll come with me to shoot the documentary.

I don’t exactly get why CNN’s headline is that some citizen publicly scolded Bush to his face. I guess it’s interesting because of the circumstances, but I don’t really see the significance of it. So people don’t like the president…what’s new about that?

I have become friends with a freelance photographer, Mohamed Alouba, who does work for the magazine. He loves classic rock (part. Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bob Marley), but can’t get any good music here. So I gave him like 6 albums to listen to. He said he cried when he heard Stairway to Heaven.

We might start a photography studio together, as business partners. He was going to do the lighting for the film I was producing, but since I backed out on the project, that’s not happening. But I’d like to continue working with him. He said how google started with two guys and one idea. Not that I expect to build the next google or anything, but I definitely want my own company.

Final notes:
1)Wikipedia is not a legitimate source for information
2)I finished War & Peace. It became an amazing novel, once I got past the first 200 pages.
3)I’m beginning to like old films. I recently watched 8 1/2 and Sunset Blvd and they were excellent.