Three bomb-filled minibuses explode outside an Iraqi mosque in a mass-casualty attack that kills more than 140 people. The narrator’s section is at the scene, near a police post, and the soldiers’ limited video footage becomes a measure of how little a recording can preserve of the event’s scale.

The bombing and its setting

The explosions occur outside a mosque close to a police post. The account gives the death toll as more than 140, establishing the attack’s catastrophic human cost without identifying who carried it out or describing how the explosives were placed. Its proximity to the post puts the narrator’s unit directly in the vicinity when the minibuses detonate.

Witnesses and the limits of the record

The first section is present when the minibuses explode. Some soldiers standing on the police-post roof film what they can with digital cameras. The narrator later watches their recordings, but says that little can be made out. The footage confirms the soldiers’ presence and their attempt to document the event, while its meagerness sharply contrasts with the scale of the deaths.

From mass-casualty scene to military operations

The bombing is followed in the account by the section’s first raid, at an apartment residence north of the large Shiite city. The soldiers approach in triangular formation across open ground, watching the windows; it has rained, and the narrator thinks the exposed approach is a way to get shot. He has only a small 9 mm pistol while the others are properly armed. The sequence moves from a devastating attack witnessed but barely captured on camera into a raid marked by the soldiers’ own vulnerability. The narrative does not establish that the raid was a direct response to the bombing, but its placement brings the civilian death toll and the unit’s continuing operations into immediate proximity.