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In Iraq, Sweet Promise Struck Down
An injured boy stands at the site in Baghdad where a suicide car bomber sped into a crowd of children gathered around U.S. soldiers distributing candy last Wednesday. Of the 26 children killed, the oldest was 13.
(By Hadi Mizban -- Associated Press)
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"Hamza had something different from other kids -- he loved to work," said his brother, Firas, 22.
Firas displayed a gold jewelry box that Hamza had given their mother for Mother's Day, with a battery-powered red light illuminating the box's heart-shaped frame. "He worked to buy this for her," Firas said. "Even I didn't do that."
The family locked the box and Hamza's possessions -- small T-shirts, a green bike, an Atari game he would play each day -- in a side room. The sight of them grieved the mother, sitting silently, blankly, against the wall in the family's back room.
Hamza had spent much of his childhood with war. Shattered glass hung in the frames of his family's front windows, which like many in Baghdad had been broken by bombs too many times for the family to bother replacing them. Shrapnel had wounded an aunt recently as the family slept on the roof to try to stay cool in the heat. An uncle, 22, lay in a hospital, able only to blink, following a separate attack after he signed up as a policeman.
Hamza's sister, Athra, 18, recalled of her brother, "Since the war, all his games changed -- all about killing." But he also liked riding his bicycle and playing soccer, and dreamed of growing up to be an engineer, family members said.
On Monday, Athra held out a recent snapshot showing Hamza at a birthday party with his friends. Wid Hussein, a neighbor and the teenage sister of Mustafa, another of the boys who died, sat beside her.
The young women identified each grinning boy in the photo. Hamza. Abbas. Muhammed. Mustafa. Adil. Bilal. Sajad. Karrar. Ali.
They tapped an index finger on the smiling face of Hamza, who was flexing a muscle and wearing a bright red shirt.
"Died," they said.
They tapped the face of the boy next to Hamza, and each boy after. "Died. Died. Died. Died. Alive. In hospital. Died. Died. Died."
U.S. troops, hoping to show their good intentions and win popular support, and mindful that boys among those Hamza's age will grow up to be the insurgents or soldiers of the next few years, often hand out candy bought from local stores or saved from meals-ready-to-eat ration packets while on noncombat patrols.
For the U.S. soldiers, Iraqi children often provide the relief of welcoming faces in a strange country of suspicious, wary looks. For soldiers with families at home, the children also are a reminder of their own.
