Lying on the ground, awake for only seconds, I knew exactly what had happened. A suicide bomb, yes, like so many mornings in Baghdad. But this time it was the one we had long feared and expected, aimed at our hotel full of foreign journalists.

My ears still half-deafened by the blast, I lay on the floor next to the bed, knowing too well what could happen next. First came the volleys of automatic fire, the shouts of guards, then the sound of screaming. Then, seconds later, even louder than the first, another blast that sent the whole building shaking all over again. Pulling the bedsheets around me, I crawled next door to the bathroom, the only room in our suite with no windows. I needn’t have bothered. Not a single shard of glass remained in the windows to fly out and injure me.

No matter how many times you run through the scenario, how well you know the drills, nothing can really prepare you for that moment when a suicide bombing of the sort that occur daily in Baghdad is suddenly aimed at you. But that realisation comes much later, long after the roar that knocks you off your feet and the robotic work mode that you suddenly slip into as the shock ebbs away.

I pulled on the first clothes I could find, picked up a bag with all my personal documents in it, and ran for the door. On the way down I met the security guards for NBC. “It’s building two,” they said, referring to the adjacent tower of the hotel. “It’s taken the worst.”

I ran down the remaining nine flights of stairs to the ground floor. Shattered glass and smears of blood covered the reception floor.

Dazed staff wandered around searching for one another. Outside, the courtyard was strewn with the charred gobbets of flesh, the unmistakeable sign of a suicide bombing that I had seen on Baghdad’s streets so many times before. At the end of the road, a woman in a black abaya was screaming, searching for her missing husband.

Two men rushed out of a neighbouring apartment block whose side had been ripped off. They were carrying a child still dressed in her pink pyjamas, bloodied and weeping. It was the little girl who used to wave at me from her balcony. Her family lived half in, half out, of the blast wall that surrounded our hotel complex and was supposed to protect us from such an attack.

Now the concrete blocks lay toppled like dominoes, peppered with shrapnel. Later we learnt how the wall had been blasted open by a first suicide truck packed with explosives in order to clear the way for a second aimed at the hotel — the same tactic used a month earlier against the Palestine hotel.

It was the sheer scale of the insurgents’ ambition that saved our lives. The crater and pile of debris created by the first explosion was so huge that the second lorry could not get through.

It detonated where it was, killing at least eight of those living in the surrounding flats. Miraculously, not a single journalist was killed. As so often, innocent Iraqis were the victims.

Of all the media hotels in Baghdad, al-Hamra, where The Times has its office, is the most legendary, an iconic war correspondents’ hotel.

The seedy, unloved Palestine, while host to several large agencies and television stations, is also home to scores of security contractors and guarded by the American military. When it was bombed last month, it was speculated that it was the journalists they were after. Or maybe, others surmised, the bombers just wanted to get their spectacular explosion captured on live television.

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