Caoimhe Butterly
Baghdad

Anwar Adel Khardom points to her heavily pregnant, shrapnel-sprayed stomach as she fluctuates between composure and frantic, inconsolable grief-”what sort of life will this child be born into?” Her thirteen year old daughter Hadil, frail arms bruised and scarred with shrapnel, head bandaged with white gauze, remains wide-eyed and observant, fanning her mother with a woven fan as the heat of an oppressive, airless day reaches it’s midday climax.

The room is crowded with relatives and friends who drink the bitter coffee and cry and keen in memory of Anwar’s husband, Adel, her 18-year old son Haider, 17-year old daughter Ola, and 8-year old daughter Mervat-all shot dead by U.S.soldiers seven days before. “How could they, why did they do it - they must of known we were a family - how could they kill my babies?”, Anwar asks continually as she holds a picture of her beautiful,smiling children-immortalised on the black banners hung on the outside walls of her family home, each of their names with shaheed (martyr) scripted next to it, proclaiming the family’s tragedy to the hushed street outside.

The car that carried Anwar’s family into a line of fire that pumped more than twenty bullets through the windshield and chassis into the warm living flesh, vital organs and skulls of her husband and children remains outside. The seats and headrests were ripped apart by bullets and remain covered in faded, darkened bloodstains. Hadil’s blood-stained handprints on the outside of the car are the same colour, left there as she groped her way out of the car that held dead Ola and Haider and dying Adel and Mervat, trying to follow her mother as Anwar ran towards the house they had just come from, screaming for help.