Here’s yet another indication that car bombs are ideologically-blind and are equal opportunity destroyers:
An American founder of a humanitarian group for Iraqi civilian war casualties has been killed in a car bomb blast, a Western official in Baghdad said Sunday.
Marla Ruzicka, founder of Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), was traveling near Baghdad International Airport on Saturday when a car bomb exploded, killing her and her driver, the official said.
The U.S. Embassy is investigating the incident and is not yet able to determine whether the attack was a suicide mission or if the bomb was remotely detonated, the official said.
It’s also unknown whether the vehicle Ruzicka was riding in was associated with a three-car convoy of an American nongovernmental organization that was traveling along the same road, the official added. That convoy may have been the target of the attack.
A Czech employee of a security firm hired to drive the convoy also was killed in the attack, said Les Campbell, regional director of the organization, the nonprofit National Democratic Institute. No NDI employees were in the convoy cars at the time of the blast, he said.
Ruzicka, 28, founded CIVIC in 2003, according to the group’s Web site. Its mission is to “mitigate the impact of the conflict and its aftermath on the people of Iraq by ensuring that timely and effective life-saving assistance is provided to those in need.”
She began a door-to-door survey of Iraqi civilian casualties the day after a statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Baghdad in April 2003, the Web site said.
The AP adds:
Ruzicka, 28, of Lakeport, founded CIVIC in 2003 and was instrumental in securing millions of dollars in aid money from the federal government for distribution in Iraq.
U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said it was Ruzicka’s idea to put a special fund in last year’s multibillion-dollar foreign aid bill to help Iraqis whose businesses had been bombed by mistake or as collateral damage.
“She was constantly calling us to say (lawmakers were) moving too slowly,” he said by telephone on Sunday. “Just from the force of her personality, we decided to take a chance on it.”
This underscores a trend that has emerged several times during this war. There have been some people killed — including several decapitated by terrorists — that went over to Iraq to help the Iraqi people. When people go over there it is, however, a “given” that they are putting their lives on the line. Bombs, insurgents and unabashed terrorists don’t give a fig about ideology — just a body count or spectacular death that can create fear and trigger grief inducing publicity.
The victim is, again, ironic. The Washington Post reports that Ruzicka underwent a big transformation when she got to Iraq:
Ruzicka came from the isolated, hilly town of Lakeport, Calif. What started out as anti-war fervor during college took her to Washington, then to Afghanistan and Iraq.
“The amazing thing is she came here as an anti-war activist, really,” said Tim Rieser, an aide to Leahy who worked closely with Ruzicka on compensating Afghan and Iraq families. But she “quickly saw that wasn’t the way to accomplish what she felt strongest about, which was to help innocent people who were wounded — to get Congress, get the U.S. military to do that.”
“In that sense, she accomplished what frankly nobody has ever accomplished,” Rieser said. “Programs were created for Afghanistan and for Iraq to provide assistance to victims of U.S. military mistakes.”
Ruzicka would lose her cell phone every other day, Rieser recalled, but she could get Bianca Jagger to a party in Kabul, win millions in public and private funds for war victims, and change the way the United States handled war, colleagues said.
Blonde, with hair variously in dreadlocks or extensions, Ruzicka could “talk, smile and bust her way into all the meetings she needed — with Afghans, Iraqis, U.S. military and U.S. Embassy people,” said Quil Lawrence, a journalist who had met her in Kabul. In Iraq, Ruzicka would don a neck-to-ankle black abaya, hiding her status as a foreigner to guard against being kidnapped, and meet with families of Iraqis who had been killed in the war.
Nick Berg, who was dreadfully and sadistically decapitated by terrorists in what basically became the Internet’s first, custom-produced terrorist “snuff film,” was another one who was trying to help Iraqis out. They could care less as they sawed his head off and he screeched in agony and unimaginable horror.
The car bomb didn’t care about Ruzicka’s intentions or political evolution, either.
UPDATE: A poignant post from Josh Marshall which reads, in part:
I was reading the text, and suddenly I thought, “That’s Marla!” Marla Ruzicka. I can’t say I knew her particularly well. She lived in my building in DC for a while; I hung out with her at parties in town a handful of times. Nothing more.
Perhaps there’s something or someone I’m forgetting. But thinking it over now I believe she’s the first person I could say I knew in any real way who was killed over there.
I didn’t know her nearly well enough to have any business describing her to you….I will leave it at sharing that memory. And may she rest in peace.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.