As the suicide bomber clutched the detonator to his explosive belt, preparing to spray fire and shrapnel into a religious procession here, an Iraqi police officer named Bilal Ali Muhammad faced a choice between his own life and something larger.
If he ran and took cover, Mr. Muhammad (31) had a chance to save himself, to continue supporting his widowed mother, to help put his younger brother through college and to watch his three young daughters grow up.
Instead, the officer — a Sunni Muslim — threw himself onto the bomber, blunting the explosion's impact on the Shia worshipers.
“He gave his soul to the country,” said his mother, Alaahin Hassan, holding two of his daughters in her lap as dozens of women wearing black veils filled her living room this week with ritualized wails of grief. “He believed in God. That made him great.”
In a country fractured by sect and ethnicity, from villages like this all the way to the government that is finally forming in Baghdad, Mr. Muhammad's last act was a burst of heroism and humanity set against the viciousness that still stalks Iraq.
Many Iraqis see the police and the Army as corrupt, incompetent and brutal, still unprepared to secure the country as the Americans withdraw over the next year. But Mr. Muhammad's death, one of thousands among Iraqi security forces, offers a counterpoint to that view.
On Monday afternoon, Mr. Muhammad was guarding the edge of an annual religious celebration of Ashura as Shias waved green and black banners and beat drums to commemorate the killing of one of their sect's foundational members in A.D. 680. The ceremonies have been ripe targets for Sunni insurgents, and Iraq's leaders have deployed swarms of security forces this year to guard against attacks.
At 2.30 p.m., according to witnesses and police officials, Mr. Muhammad spotted a suspicious man approaching the crowd, his hand wedged into his pocket. Mr. Muhammad, a police officer for five years, stopped the man and asked him, What do you have in your pocket? The man replied, It's none of your business.
Pulling open the man's jacket, Mr. Muhammad found an explosive belt strapped to his chest. Whether from instinct or training, or sheer lack of any other options, he acted in that instant.
Shouting warnings to the crowd, he wrapped his arms around the bomber. As both men tumbled to the dirt, the explosion ripped through their bodies and raked the street, scarring the white walls of a schoolyard.
A woman and her granddaughter sitting nearby were killed and a dozens of others were wounded. But the police said the death toll would have been drastically higher had Mr. Muhammad not thrown himself onto the bomber.
“He's a hero,” said Mr. Muhammad's uncle, Hamza Hassan, who spent the day welcoming well-wishers to a funeral tent outside Mr. Muhammad's family home here in this farming town near the Iranian border. “The only choice was to become a martyr.”
Since 2004, about 2,200 police officers have been killed here in Diyala, a north-eastern province that is a stronghold of Al-Qaida in Mesopotamia and a crucible of Iraq's volatile mix of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. They have been killed in broad offensives against police stations, by magnetic bombs under their cars, by pistol shots at checkpoints.
At least three of them, confronting suicide bombers, have made the extraordinary decision to wrap their arms around their killers to absorb the blast.
In nearby Baquba, inside a neat house by the trash-strewn banks of a languid stream, the family of Naseem Sabah Ismail is well acquainted with the accolades of heroics. In January 2008, Mr. Ismail (23) threw himself onto an old man trying to set off a suicide vest at an Ashura procession.
“He knew he was going to die,” said his father, Sabah Ismail. “He went to him anyway. He held onto him.”
The government provided a pension to the officer's family and a few thousand dollars for burial in the Shia cemetery in Najaf. But nearly three years later, the family said their sacrifice had largely been forgotten.
After his death, local officials made effusive speeches and private pledges vowing to promote Mr. Ismail to first lieutenant and build a statue in his honour. The statue was never built, and the promotion never came.
“The government only gave us promises,” said his mother, Sabriya Abed. “But it was all lies.”
All day Wednesday, friends and relatives in Balad Ruz sat in mourning to remember Mr. Muhammad. They said he had been the family's main breadwinner after his father died in the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s. They recalled that Mr. Muhammad loved taking his daughters for picnics or on bicycle rides through the rutted streets.
The muddy alleys behind the family's home were clotted with the pickup trucks and the Land Cruisers of police officials, who offered their condolences and donated a few thousand Iraqi dinars to help cover funeral expenses.
Commanders said they would seek a posthumous promotion. And build a statue in his honour. — New York Times News Service
