The Baghdad Hotel is a large hotel in Baghdad, Iraq, favored by Westerners after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The hotel overlooks the Tigris on its eastern bank.
The Baghdad Hotel Bombing Terror Attack occurred on October 12, 2003, when a car rigged with a bomb drove past a checkpoint near the hotel. It drove down a side street before it was fired on by guards and exploded, killing the suicide bomber and six Iraqis. 32 other people were wounded, including three US soldiers. Security officials said that concrete barriers absorbed much of the blast, and prevented the car from destroying the hotel. Western journalists, workers, and American and Iraqi members of the Iraqi Governing Council frequently stayed at the hotel.
Famous quotes containing the word hotel:
“The hotel was once where things coalesced, where you could meet both townspeople and travelers. Not so in a motel. No matter how you build it, the motel remains the haunt of the quick and dirty, where the only locals are Chamber of Commerce boys every fourth Thursday. Who ever heard the returning traveler exclaim over one of the great motels of the world he stayed in? Motels can be big, but never grand.”
—William Least Heat Moon [William Trogdon] (b. 1939)