Doha Qatar Car Bomb
So it is likely you have heard about Qatar's first terrorist car bomb this last weekend. I’ve been meaning to write about it for awhile but things have been popping up this week so I haven’t been able to give it justice. Now it’s Friday night over here so I thought I would finally sit down and write out what happened from my perspective.
I heard the bomb go off when I was actually walking back to my building as Kara drove to the airport to pick up Danna who is a friend of ours. We were running late so I asked her to drop me off a block away from our building. So while I was on my random walk home I heard a definite boom. It wasn’t like an earsplitting explosion but a solid noise. My first thought was a car bomb. I then thought no way this is Doha, it's probably a construction accident. I guess I felt incompetence was much more of a danger here then terrorists were.
Well as you probably know by now it was a bomb and not an accident. From what I understand the terrorist was an Egyptian man who lived in Doha for 15 years. He had a steady job, a wife and two children. He was a computer programmer for Qatar Petroleum and on most accounts was an average upper middle class family man. His wife was reported to say that he was a devout Muslim and never imagined that he would do something like this. In the Muslim culture men are the ones who primarily go to the mosque while the wife stays at home. It is not surprising that she did not know what was happening. I want to be clear, I see terrorists as a very small subset of the Muslim community. Much in the same way the KKK is a small subset of the Christian community. He could have also been part of a sleeper cell this whole time. All I can really do is speculate so I won’t say anymore about it.
Life in Doha has changed or at least the attitude in the expatriate community has. The security has been stepped up at the building we live in and all of the compounds. The security at education city is no longer a joke. I got to see my first car bomb detector and they are not allowing anybody to park under the building I work in. We also have a full time police officer watching our parking lot. We went to church today after much talking and praying. One of the other churches in Doha is actually not meeting for a while. This past week the government knocked on the doors of our church and pretty much said we are going to protect you. From what I heard it wasn’t up for debate not that there would have been any protest if it was. I don’t want to give out too many details except we now have concrete blocks located around the existing concrete wall that encloses our building. They’ve also taken several other measures for our protection. It’s a great thing that they took the effort to protect us. I see it partly as God working in this area. On a secular level you could argue that having a church full of westerners is better then having a bombed church full of westerners.
I don’t know how to explain it, for the most part everything is the same but it seems like Doha lost its "innocence". I think what we saw was a definite turn in the history of this country. This is the first time something like this has happened here. We can no longer laugh about being in the Middle East because we know what connotations it carries compared to the actual reality. We never really thought of Doha as the "Middle East". In contrast to last week I spent most of the church service today scanning the exits to see what would the quickest way be out if a car came through the wall. I also thought about which outside wall was the most likely to be hit. When a car went roaring by I tensed up some. The car that hit the theatre raced into it before exploding. This maybe residual paranoia but in the end I think it’s somewhat helpful. I feel like it’s good to be alert / scared but you can’t let it control you. I’ve done a lot of praying for protection in the past 6 days. In the end I know prayer is the reason we didn’t have an incident today. Concrete barriers are nice, but nothing man can do is full proof.
Below are a couple of links to different news stories about the bomb in case you have not read any yet.
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2005/March/middleeast_March615.xml§ion=middleeast&col
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2005/March/middleeast_March618.xml§ion=middleeast&col
http://www.forbes.com/home/energy/2005/03/25/cz_0325oxan_qatarattack.html
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2005/March/middleeast_March705.xml§ion=middleeast
These aren’t exactly the most comforting articles but they are not meant to scare our family or friends either. It’s just an account of what we are reading over here. I hope all is well with everybody.
I heard the bomb go off when I was actually walking back to my building as Kara drove to the airport to pick up Danna who is a friend of ours. We were running late so I asked her to drop me off a block away from our building. So while I was on my random walk home I heard a definite boom. It wasn’t like an earsplitting explosion but a solid noise. My first thought was a car bomb. I then thought no way this is Doha, it's probably a construction accident. I guess I felt incompetence was much more of a danger here then terrorists were.
Well as you probably know by now it was a bomb and not an accident. From what I understand the terrorist was an Egyptian man who lived in Doha for 15 years. He had a steady job, a wife and two children. He was a computer programmer for Qatar Petroleum and on most accounts was an average upper middle class family man. His wife was reported to say that he was a devout Muslim and never imagined that he would do something like this. In the Muslim culture men are the ones who primarily go to the mosque while the wife stays at home. It is not surprising that she did not know what was happening. I want to be clear, I see terrorists as a very small subset of the Muslim community. Much in the same way the KKK is a small subset of the Christian community. He could have also been part of a sleeper cell this whole time. All I can really do is speculate so I won’t say anymore about it.
Life in Doha has changed or at least the attitude in the expatriate community has. The security has been stepped up at the building we live in and all of the compounds. The security at education city is no longer a joke. I got to see my first car bomb detector and they are not allowing anybody to park under the building I work in. We also have a full time police officer watching our parking lot. We went to church today after much talking and praying. One of the other churches in Doha is actually not meeting for a while. This past week the government knocked on the doors of our church and pretty much said we are going to protect you. From what I heard it wasn’t up for debate not that there would have been any protest if it was. I don’t want to give out too many details except we now have concrete blocks located around the existing concrete wall that encloses our building. They’ve also taken several other measures for our protection. It’s a great thing that they took the effort to protect us. I see it partly as God working in this area. On a secular level you could argue that having a church full of westerners is better then having a bombed church full of westerners.
I don’t know how to explain it, for the most part everything is the same but it seems like Doha lost its "innocence". I think what we saw was a definite turn in the history of this country. This is the first time something like this has happened here. We can no longer laugh about being in the Middle East because we know what connotations it carries compared to the actual reality. We never really thought of Doha as the "Middle East". In contrast to last week I spent most of the church service today scanning the exits to see what would the quickest way be out if a car came through the wall. I also thought about which outside wall was the most likely to be hit. When a car went roaring by I tensed up some. The car that hit the theatre raced into it before exploding. This maybe residual paranoia but in the end I think it’s somewhat helpful. I feel like it’s good to be alert / scared but you can’t let it control you. I’ve done a lot of praying for protection in the past 6 days. In the end I know prayer is the reason we didn’t have an incident today. Concrete barriers are nice, but nothing man can do is full proof.
Below are a couple of links to different news stories about the bomb in case you have not read any yet.
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2005/March/middleeast_March615.xml§ion=middleeast&col
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2005/March/middleeast_March618.xml§ion=middleeast&col
http://www.forbes.com/home/energy/2005/03/25/cz_0325oxan_qatarattack.html
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2005/March/middleeast_March705.xml§ion=middleeast
These aren’t exactly the most comforting articles but they are not meant to scare our family or friends either. It’s just an account of what we are reading over here. I hope all is well with everybody.
posted by Russell at
11:23 PM
1 Comments:
Thank you, very interesting!
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