Here is the craziest non-sickening story I know about the Iraqi refugee crisis. It was told to me this October in Syria by an Iraqi architect I’ll call Mazen — a dapper, cosmopolitan man in his 60s who had worked for years with UNESCO, identifying and preserving world heritage sites throughout his country. Early one morning in 2006, while Mazen and his wife were asleep in their home in Baghdad, a bomb — not a rocket or a grenade or an IED, but a bomb, easily 4 feet long, with the letters ‘U.S.A.’ stenciled on its side — tore through the wall of their house and landed on the bed between them, slamming its nose into the headboard. Miraculously, it did not explode. It did, however, wake the couple up in a hurry. They flew out of bed, whereupon the magnitude of their near miss became apparent. Mazen and his wife were entirely uninjured, except for a pair of matching burns on their right and left sides. Awakened by the commotion, the couple’s daughter fetched the family video camera and started recording. Later in Damascus, she showed me the footage: the jagged crater in the wall, the bed […]