A group of eight, including the four friends, walked up the street about 500 yards. Four, including Sudani, broke off to a restaurant to eat breakfast. The other four, including Jabri, went next door to shoot pool.
Insurgents Attack
Jabri said his friends were racking the balls when the room imploded. The ceiling collapsed. The windows shattered. Jabri dropped to the floor and crawled under the pool table, he said, to protect himself from the falling debris.
From left, police recruits Raed Sudani, Adel Finjan and Jawaad Jabri say they still want to become officers despite a campaign of violence against Iraqi security forces and pleas by their family members not to take the risks.
(Steve Fainaru -- The Washington Post)
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"I waited a minute, maybe a minute and a half, until everything was quiet," he said. "Then I went to find my friends."
He found Sudani, dazed and covered in blood, in the ruined restaurant. He had been just about to take a bite of his kubba, a meat-filled pastry, when the bomb detonated. A shard of hot metal broke his right thumb, sliced open his index finger and hit him in the mouth, knocking out a front tooth and bloodying his lip.
Jabri guided Sudani to the curb and went to look for others. It was an unimaginable panorama, he said. A recruit named Taha had his right leg nearly blown off; a man was cradling it while he helped Taha away from the scene. Jabri walked back toward the concrete barriers where most of the recruits had gathered. The area was littered with the dead and wounded.
The Iraqi Health Ministry said at least 47 people were killed and 114 injured.
After being treated at the hospital, Sudani went home to his family -- his clothes bloodied, his tooth missing and lip shredded, his gauze-covered arm wrapped in a white sling. He could no longer tell them he was in training at the Transportation Ministry. The bombing had been all over the news.
"They were furious, and they were hysterical, and they were happy at the same time that I was alive," he said.
His father pleaded with him to give up the job. Sudani talked it over with Jabri, Aboud and Finjan. They decided to stick it out.
Asked why, Sudani replied: "Life needs."
So on Sept. 18, the four men stuffed their duffel bags with clothes and other possessions and set out for the Police Sports Club, their families crying as they left. The club was on the other side of Baghdad from the bombing. It sat across from a U.S. military base on Palestine Street, one of the city's busiest arteries.
For security reasons, the recruits had not been told where the training would take place, only that they should show up ready to leave for eight weeks.
Authorities had closed off Palestine Street to vehicles, but this time the recruits were allowed to walk to the sports club on foot. "If we die, we die together," Jabri told his friends.
Sudani entered the gym still bandaged from the bombing.
Inside, it was chaos. It was unclear which of the recruits would be accepted for training. Police officers argued with one another. Finjan said the four men initially were told they had been accepted, but when the list was read, their names were not on it.
Then the mortar shells started landing. The session was canceled and the recruits made their way back into the dangerous streets. The last shell fell in a courtyard just as the four friends got into a taxi.
When Sudani walked back into his home that afternoon, he still didn't have a job, but his family greeted him as if he had returned from the dead.
"God does not want this to happen," he recalled his weeping father telling him. "This is the will of God."
Special correspondent Bassam Sebti contributed to this report.
