Baghdad, Iraq – It should have been a joyous homecoming for the newlyweds. Iraqi army Capt. Wissam Abdul-Wahab and his bride had spent their wedding night at a fancy hotel.
But their second day as husband and wife became their last.
Gunmen sprayed their car with bullets as they drove home Friday, killing the bride and wounding the groom.
“My poor Sally, she was very happy yesterday,” sobbed her mother-in-law, Latifah Mohammed, too distraught to tell her son his 23-year-old bride 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 wife.
“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 Ah med, 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 since the new Shiite- and Kurd ish-dominated government was announced April 28.
Also Friday, police tightened security in an upscale Baghdad neighborhood as the search intensified for two Algerian diplomats kidnapped there. At least 16 people died in attacks in Baghdad and elsewhere.
More police were on the streets and motorists reported extra checkpoints Friday in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Mansour, where top Algerian envoy Ali Belaroussi, 62, and fellow Algerian diplomat Azzedine Belkadi, 47, were seized the day before. They were not traveling with bodyguards.
The kidnappings brought to five the number of key diplomats from Islamic countries targeted in Baghdad in less than three weeks in an attempt to undermine support for the Iraqi government among Arab and Muslim nations.
Police officials said they suspected the diplomats and their kidnappers may still be in the Mansour area.
