One Minute Later...

This past Thursday, my husband's cousin/neighbor/close friend drove over to the barbershop he and my husband are regulars at, in the Jami'a district. He parked his car and crossed the street. Just before he entered the store, and as he was turning towards something, a roadside bomb hidden in the median went off. Apparently, it was targeting a National Guard envoy driving by.
The barber shop cousin 'A' was heading into had its windows blown out, and its ceiling caved in. Bystanders were injured, and one man was killed. In the process, cousin A's driver's side window was shattered. Thankfully, he wasn't in the car at the time. He got away with one cut on his arm, but one of his friend's had his face all swollen from the shards of glass which had entered it. And many others were more seriously injured.
SubhanaAllah, that's the way things happen here, and everywhere else for that matter. You go on with your daily life, realizing that something might happen at any moment, and hoping that you are one minute earlier or one minute later.

NOTE: The National Guard (haras watani) are constantly under attack here in Baghdad, along with the Iraqi police and the American forces. The problem is, they set up patrols/checkpoints in areas that are close to residences, and when they get attacked (pretty often in Jami'a), they start firing their guns like crazy, without any concern for where their ammo lands. Numerous home/car windows have been blown out in this way, and needless to say, people have been injured. As I've mentioned before, in Jami'a district, it's a neverending cycle, where the insurgency attacks the Iraqi forces, so they move in and set up checkpoints and shoot around like crazy, and the insurgency continues attacking them in these residential/business areas. People stop coming to these areas, businesses start closing down, residents start moving out, and one more neighborhood has been closed down.