It was in this completely stressed out state that I arrived several hours later in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital. My disquiet and stress were nothing compared to what people here were suffering. In the first days after these attacks, there was some doubt about who did this. The Sri Lankan authorities initially believed the attacks were the work of an obscure homegrown Islamist group with possible foreign connections. Walking up to that church erased any doubts I had. The high cathedral ceiling had been blown off and red roofing tiles lay scattered everywhere. All around me, the walls had been drilled by shrapnel, and blood was splattered 20 feet high.

Standing there, I had a flashback: The headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. Erbil, Iraq, 2004. That was the first suicide bombing I covered and I’ll never be able to forget it. Al Qaeda agents had planned the attack to happen during a busy Muslim holiday. The carnage was devastating. Never before did I appreciate how fragile we are as human beings, no match for the forces of physics. People are not supposed to be smeared across walls like flies. I stepped into that room as one person. I came out as another.

Whoever built the bomb that tore through St. Sebastian’s Church had a similar expertise to the bombmakers in Iraq. The initial reports said one man, with a backpack, had walked into the Easter Mass. I knew that only an experienced bombmaker — an experienced mass murderer — could have packed so much explosive into a relatively small device.

In recent days, more evidence has emerged linking the Sri Lanka attacks to the Islamic State. That organization might seem so far away and abstract. But the point that the Islamic State clearly wanted to make, not so much in Sri Lanka but through Sri Lanka, was that no matter where you are or what you’re doing, you are never safe.