Iraq: the human toll

[kayell]

Mods, I know this is more than 12 hours old, but nobody seems to have posted it yet, please move or delete if necessary.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,992588,00.html

It was Rahad's turn to hide. 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. But while Rahad crouched behind the wall of a neighbour's house, someone else - not playing the game - had spotted her, and her friends; someone above. The pilot of an American A-10 'tank-buster' aircraft, hovering in a figure of eight. He was flying an airborne weapon equipped with some of the most advanced and accurate equipment for 'precision target recognition' in the Pentagon's arsenal. And at 5.30pm on 29 March, he launched his weapon at the street scene below.
The 'daisy-cutter' bounced and exploded a few feet above ground, blasting red-hot shrapnel into the walls not of a tank but of houses. Rahad Septi and 10 other children lost their lives; another 12 were injured. Three adults were also killed.

Juma Septi, father to Rahad, holds a photograph of his daughter in the palm of his hand as he recalls the afternoon he lost his 'little flower'. A carpenter, Septi had been a lifelong opponent of Saddam Hussein - an activist in the Islamic Accord Party, for which he had been imprisoned, then exiled to Jordan in 1995. Last October, Septi had returned under an armistice to start a new life in his home town, reunited with his family. 'I don't really know what to think now,' he says. 'We have lost Saddam Hussein, but I have lost my daughter. They came to kill him, but killed her and the other children instead. What am I supposed to make of that?'

Jamal Abbas joins the conversation. 'I was driving my taxi and heard the noise like thunder, when someone told me, "Jamal, they've bombed your street!" When I got back here, the smoke was so thick it was like night - children lying wounded and women screaming.' Abbas learnt that his niece - 11-year-old Arij Haki, visiting from Baghdad - had been killed immediately. 'She was playing a guessing game with her cousins,' says the child's father Abdullah Mohammed, 'when the top half of her head was blown off.'

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