Contact Admin. The nine-year-old girl found a good place to conceal herself from her playmates, the game of hide and seek having lasted some two hours along a quiet residential street in the town of Fallujah, on the banks of the Euphrates. Rahad Septi and 10 other children lost their lives; another 12 were injured.
Three adults were also killed. A carpenter, Septi had been a lifelong opponent of Saddam Hussein β an activist in the Islamic Accord Party, for which he had been imprisoned, then exiled to Jordan in Last October, Septi had returned under an armistice to start a new life in his home town, reunited with his family. They came to kill him, but killed her and the other children instead. What am I supposed to make of that?
The two fathers accordingly sat in vigil together. Otherwise, I would go mad. Rahad had a tongue in her head, for sure. She talked too much. She was very little, really, but understood things quickly. The children have been buried together rather than in family plots. Do you have good eyesight? Is your computer working well? But there was no military activity in this area. There was no shooting. This is not a military camp. These are houses with children playing in the street.
A graphic illustration of this can be found in the corner of the Abu Graib cemetery on the edge of Baghdad. But other huddles of people came, too β to bury, not recover, their dead. The grave digger, Akef Aziz, explains that those from the military, or Fedayeen Saddam units, were also covered with an Iraqi flag. Out of a total of graves in this plot, 17 are those of fighters.
But here, on the following pages, are some of their stories. The southern Iraqi town of Nasiriyah, where the American ground offensive began in earnest during the last days of March, will before long be the best known in all Iraq.
