IRBIL, Iraq -- He was promised a straight shot to heaven and 72 maidens to wait on him once he got there, but Hoshir Sabir Hasan was not ready to die.
So instead of agreeing to be a suicide bomber, Hasan, a 23-year-old Iraqi Kurd who belonged to a group of radical Islamic insurgents tied to al Qaeda, said he consented to be the lookout in a plot last June in this northern city.
Halgord Ali, left, stands outside the auto repair shop in the Iraqi city of Irbil where his father was fatally injured in a car bombing that was intended for the Kurdish regional culture minister. Awat Abdul Hamid, his father's partner, at right, was not injured in the attack.
(Jackie Spinner -- The Washington Post)
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Hasan said he scanned the street in front of the Culture Ministry for police and then ran back to alert the insurgent cell leader that it was clear. He heard the explosion 45 minutes later.
Halgord Ali, 22, did not hear the blast, only the sound of his mobile phone ringing a few minutes later. It was a friend telling him to go to the hospital right away. Ali's father had been injured in a car bombing in front of his auto repair shop, the friend said.
Ali said he rushed to the hospital and found his father, Sayd Ali, dead, he recalled Tuesday at the shop. The car had exploded in front of the College of Eternal Love, across the street from the shop, where Sayd Ali was working outside on a car. A piece of metal pierced Sayd Ali like an arrow through the back and stomach. He died on the way to the hospital.
"He was very kind," Halgord Ali said of his father. "He was very sociable. He helped the poor."
Ali said he is worried about his mother. She has refused to the leave the house since her husband died. Ali works in the shop with his father's business partner to help support his mother, two brothers and two sisters.
The people who set off the bomb "are not human beings," Ali said, his hands trembling as he cradled a small snapshot of his father, who died at 49. "They are savages, these people."
Hasan, a slight man with pale skin and a boyish face, said he was at home with his wife and young daughter on the night of the blast when he learned that an auto mechanic had been killed in the bombing.
The target had been Ahmed Mohammed, the culture minister for the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq. The minister and five bodyguards were wounded but survived. As the soft-spoken Hasan recounted the story from a detention facility, he choked back tears and clenched his trembling hands.
"It was terrible," said Hasan, adding that he has not seen or heard from his family since he was arrested by Kurdish security forces 12 days after the June 26 attack. "I was very afraid. I didn't know what to do."
'I Don't Like Revenge'
Abdulluh Ali Mohammed, 35, the dapper security director for Irbil, is the man responsible for keeping the city safe. He is part of a vast network of police and intelligence agents deployed throughout the Kurdish-populated area of Iraq.
Insurgents have frequently struck the region. On Tuesday, two police officers were killed while trying to defuse a bomb that insurgents had planted. But the attacks here generally have not had the same force or been as successful in disrupting daily life as in other major Iraqi cities. Most Kurds who went to the polls to vote in Sunday's historic elections did so with little fear or hesitation about potential violence.
Kurdish security officials said they have arrested 300 suspected insurgents since the day one year ago when two suicide bombers struck the headquarters of the two major Kurdish political parties, killing at least 67 people. On that day, Feb. 1, 2004, the Kurds declared an unofficial war on the insurgency, police officials said in interviews.
