Hakim had just finished his sermon and was walking toward his motorcade when a car bomb exploded, followed quickly by a second. The blasts killed at least eighty-five people who had crowded the plaza for a glimpse of the cleric, and wounded more than five hundred. Thousands of worshippers and pilgrims fled the shrine in a panic, trampling over the dying and injured as they rushed the gates. Of Hakim, a man who had embodied the hopes of so many Iraqis as well as Americans, nothing identifiable was found except for a hand bearing the imam’s wedding ring.
