it was an accident. For over a year we’ve been saying that Sinuar has to be killed and then yesterday, as we were leaving the manicured park, with its perfect little paths and planned water ways, the news came. Sinuar has been killed.

The connection we felt to those horrendous moments where the photograph showed his body, mangled from the drone after his hand been shot off – was terrifying.  The picture disappeared from the internet a moment after, but I couldn’t help thinking of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who’d lost an arm in captivity and then was one of the six ‘protecting’ Sinyuar before he was murdered.  Everything seemed connected.

Should we rejoice? Should we despair?  The fact that Sinyuar had money and fake passports with him indicates that he was about the leave the country, to escape, and that would have left us in even more darkness about the hostages.   

And the hostages seem every day to become more and more relatives, loved ones, about whom we know more and more.

We are so involved in all that goes on here with this terrible situation – that it keeps reminding me of the television show I loved in my childhood – Walter Cronkite – who enacted scenes from history as if they were news and ended every program with:

“What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times… and you were there.”