Gunmen target newlyweds in latest Iraq tragedy
Gunmen in Iraq sprayed a car with bullets, killing a bride and wounding the groom as they drove home on their first day as husband and wife.
Iraqi army captain Wissam Abdul-Wahab and his new bride had just spent their wedding night at a fancy hotel.
“My poor Sally, she was very happy yesterday,” sobbed the bride’s mother-in-law, Latifah Mohammed, too distraught to tell her son that his 23-year-old wife was dead.
Lying in a hospital bed as doctors removed fragments of bone and shrapnel from his right hand, a bloodied and bandaged Abdul-Wahab begged his family to tell him what had happened to his bride.
“What happened to us? How is Sally? She is dead, right? Tell me the truth please. I have the feeling she is dead,” he sobbed.
Abdul-Wahab’s brother Ahmed, 28, who was also wounded in the drive-by shooting, reassured him gently: “She is fine. She is fine, believe me,” he said as his eyes filled with tears.
In a country where violence claims dozens of people every day, it was one more story of heartbreak – a reminder of how ordinary lives have been shattered by the constant drumbeat of violence and death.
More than 1,700 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in a surge of violence since the new Shiite and Kurdish-dominated government was announced April 28.
Grimacing in pain in the middle of Yarmouk Hospital’s emergency ward, Abdul-Wahab told a reporter how he and his bride had got married yesterday at his parents’ home in the southern Baghdad neighbourhood of Dora.
“My brother came this morning with a taxi driver to pick us up from the Babylon Hotel,” he said. “As we arrived at our home, a car with gunmen inside sprayed us with machine gun-fire. Suddenly I lost sight of everything and then found myself here.”
A bewildered Abdul-Wahab said he didn’t know why he was attacked. “No-one threatened me before. I have no enemies. Who did this to me?”
Afterwards, his brother, Ahmed Abdul-Wahab, said he believed assailants came after them because he was a police lieutenant in Fallujah, while Wissam was a captain in the Iraqi army.
“We don’t have any enemies to be attacked like this, but I’m sure that they targeted us just because my brother is an army officer and I’m a police officer. But I’m sure God will get revenge for us from those criminals who target Iraqi security forces.”
It wasn’t supposed to end this way, he said. His brother had been waiting for years to marry to his sweetheart. Stocky and serious, the 25-year-old from Fallujah was a captain in training at Iraq’s military training school in Diyala.
“Wissam was in love with Sally for three years and when he saved up good money, he told us that he was dreaming of making Sally his wife,” Ahmed Abdul-Wahab said.
The couple had got engaged a year ago and planned a modest wedding because one of the groom’s brothers had been killed last autumn during a US military offensive against Fallujah.
Standing in the hospital corridors later, the groom’s mother burst into tears as she recounted how she had been waiting for the young couple to return home.
“I heard heavy shooting and realised that these shootings were not for happiness, like we do to celebrate, because the bullets hit the house and shattered the glass on me,” she said.
When she ran out, she saw the four people covered in blood on the ground.
“It was horrible. I can’t forget this sight. I can’t forget Sally’s beautiful face as the bullet hit her,” she said.
