Iraq: Jassim Mohammed was only a few metres away when the suicide bomber decided to detonate. He had driven past a white pickup truck moments before, and watched in his wing mirror as the vehicle pulled out from the long line of cars queuing to enter the US headquarters.
Jassim thought it merely a driver fed-up with waiting for the customary security search before entering the compound. A few seconds later, the bomb exploded.
The force of the blast tore out the windows of Mohammed's car, and flattened the roof to within three feet of the ground.
"I saw the sky became red with fire. The next second the force of the explosion had thrown me through the passenger door window." Jassim, a 32 year-old taxi-driver, emerged with only shrapnel wounds to the head and a partially missing ear lobe.
"Praise God I am alive," he said. "Now I'm going to seek compensation from the Americans."
Jassim was one of only a handful of survivors caught in the immediate vicinity of yesterday's suicide bombing. Others were not so lucky.
Half a tonne of explosives packed into the truck had wrought a scene of devastation.
The suicide bomber's target was the seat of US power in Iraq. He succeeded largely in killing ordinary Iraqis.
A mini-bus stood beside the blast site, bent out of shape and disgorged of its passengers. They lay, injured and dying, on the surrounding street.
Car wrecks lay burning where the blast had thrown them. One contained the charred remains of an Iraqi man.
"Everywhere I looked there were bodies," said Safar Hassan, a decorator, who had just left the compound, but rushed back to help with the injured.
"It looked like the scene of a great battle," he said, "I never want to see such things again."
Fifteen minutes later, ambulances arrived to ferry away the injured to a local hospital.
The gate to the coalition citadel itself, heavily fortified since the summer, was left undamaged.
Witnesses described how US soldiers guarding the security cordon ducked behind crash barriers as they saw the truck approach.
A US military spokesman said: "The blast occurred at the last point a vehicle could get to without being stopped. The barriers absorbed most of the blast and saved a lot of lives."
Yesterday morning, US soldiers sealed off the area while investigators, with sniffer dogs, pored over the site.
There was an angry mood among the crowds of Iraqis who had come to witness the scene.
An Iraqi woman had to be restrained from throwing herself onto the security cordon set up by the military.
"Where's my son, where's my son," she screamed at the soldiers. Another man demanded to see his brother, a building contractor, who he'd last seen alive queuing to enter the compound.
Khalid Ahmed, a bomb survivor, his head wrapped in bandages and his face still a bloody mess, petitioned a soldier to let him inspect his wrecked car. He met with little success.
"What is happening to this country?" Ahmed exclaimed. "We never used to have violence like this. Now no one feels safe walking on the street. The Americans came to this country through violence and the violence won't end until they go."