Ruzicka, an activist killed in Iraqi suicide blast

Marla Ruzicka, founder of Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, died Saturday in the blast, which also killed an Iraqi and another foreigner, officials said. She had been in Iraq conducting door-to-door surveys trying to determine the number of civilian casualties in the country.

Ruzicka was killed on Baghdad’s most dangerous road when a suicide bomber aiming for a U.S. convoy pulled up alongside her and detonated his explosives.

The blast also killed Ruzicka’s longtime Iraqi aide and driver, Faiz Ali Salim, 43, as they drove the road to a U.S. military base by the airport, where foreigners travel for flights out of the country and where Iraqis go to ask for help from the American forces.

On Friday, a day before she died, two car bombs killed 18 people in the neighborhood where Ruzicka was staying with foreign journalists.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont said Sunday.

“She came to us with the idea of putting a special fund in the foreign aid bill to take care of projects to help people whose businesses had been bombed by the U.S by mistake or collateral damage of some sort,” Leahy explained. “Just from the force of her personality, we decided to take a chance on it.”

“It’s a terrible tragedy and a tragic irony that somebody who devoted her life to helping the victims of war would herself become a victim of war,” said Medea Benjamin, director of the San Francisco-based human rights group Global Exchange, where Ruzicka got her start a decade ago in the world of non-governmental organizations.

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.

This time Ruzicka stayed in Baghdad longer than she had planned because she believed she had found the key to establishing, that the U.S. military kept records of its civilian victims, despite its official statements otherwise, colleagues said.

Ruzicka’s parents said they were notified of her death just hours after the explosion. U.S. Embassy officials publicly released Ruzicka’s name Sunday.

“We’ve been very worried about her but we know better than to tell our children not to do anything. We were supportive and just reminded her to be careful,” said her mother, Nancy Ruzicka.

She said her daughter had left her a telephone message the night before her death that said, “Mom and dad, I love you. I’m OK.”

“A number is important not only to quantify the cost of the war, but to me each number is also a story of someone whose hopes, dreams and potential will never be realized, and who left behind a family,” Ruzicka wrote.

“She cared about people and gave people her love and help,” Nancy Ruzicka said. “I’ll remember the love she spread around the world and the good ambassador that she was for her country.”