I set off for the internet. I’m wearing the poker face I’ve learnt from the Iraqi women to deflect harassment, staring straight ahead, slightly fiercely, not responding to any shouts or remarks, even greetings, because as soon as one man sees you say hello to another, you’re fair game.

The air seems impossibly full for a second and then bursts with a roar, sending a tremor through the ground that shoots up the leg my weight is on, unbalancing me slightly, but the poker face doesn’t flinch. Young men start running past me towards the direction of the explosion. That’s when the shock hits me: I’ve learnt to ignore things blowing up behind me.

A burst of gunfire sends a crowd of children and young men running back the other way. “Wayn? Wayn?” people are asking. Where? “Kahromana,” someone says, referring to the sculpture of Ali Baba’s wife pouring hot oil into the barrels where the forty thieves were hiding, which stands at the junction between Karrada Dahkil, Karrada Kharitj and Saadoon.

The shopkeepers scoop up the boxes of electrical goods, fruit and toys from the array on the pavement and haul down the metal shutters in front of the windows, if they’ve still got any. The less fortunate sweep and shovel the splintered glass. Towards Kahromana most of the windows even on Karrada Dakhil are destroyed; on Karrada Kharitj there’s barely one intact.

“Wayn infijar?” someone asks me. Where’s the explosion?

I don’t know but you can see smoke from the road towards Simona and Paola’s house. A raw clatter of gunfire, very close and very loud, drives another crowd of young men running. They’re saying it was a car bomb, saying it’s a hotel.

I carry on towards the internet, the old men ask me the same question. “Wayn infijar?”

I tell them the shebab say it was a hotel.

“Al-Sadeer?”

I don’t know, but they say it was a car bomb.

No, they insist straight away. It wasn’t a car bomb. It was a missile. One of them points to the sky and traces the arc of the thing just to make sure I understand.

It’s weirdly dislocating to find the next street live on TV, Al-Jazeera bring on the scene almost instantaneously because the hotel where they live and work is behind the one blown up. The men in the internet say it was the Funduq Burj Lubnaan - the Lebanon Tower Hotel, an apartment hotel used mainly by families from other Arab countries. No one can think of a reason why it was targeted. People speculate that the bomb was being taken somewhere else and blew up there by mistake.

Sam comes back in shock. He’s never seen the flames, the panic, the craters, the impossibly copious smoke. The mobile phone network is jammed so I can’t ring anyone to see if they’re OK, say we’re all OK. In the morning we walk over because Sam needs to see it in daylight, to know that the flames are out.

There’s no front on the hotel, the street a mire of bricks, puddles, foul stinking mud and craters filled with water. Smoke still limps out of windows and doors inside houses, their front rooms exposed to the world like dolls’ houses, men with shirts wrapped around their faces sweeping out the debris from a first floor room, the side wall split like a rotten trunk.

When they discover I speak a bit of Arabic, everyone wants to talk. I can’t find anyone who accepts that it was a car bomb. The US soldiers say it was a thousand pounds of plastic explosive wrapped in some kind of artillery. It’s impossible to see what’s in the crater, whether there’s any part of the skeleton of a car, because it’s full of water from the fire hoses.

Unanimously people insist it was a missile. It came from the air. I ask everyone, did you see it yourself? No, no, they all say, but as we’re leaving there’s one who says he saw it. He points to his right, my left, opposite the demolished hotel, but behind the row of buildings which faced it. He says he was standing close to where he is now and he saw it. He thinks it was the Americans, as do all the men around him, all the people who came to talk.

Of course, it could be denial, scapegoating, wanting to blame someone and something else, something foreign for all the problems, to avoid having to address them from within. It could be. Like the Ashura bombing, like dozens of smaller explosions, a lot of people think it’s a tactic by the US troops to foment troubles between Shia and Sunni as a justification for prolonging the occupation.

Either way it’s going to be hard to find anything out because a US military bulldozer rolls past us scooping up whatever forensic evidence there might have been. A CNN reporter swoops on a small child carrying a plastic doll, bereft of several limbs, and arranges them for the camera. Where is the truth?

A year after the war, where is the truth? Bulldozed and arranged for the camera, dead and buried under the rubble.