The Eyes of Amal

She started simply, with a customary religious invocation:

"In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate

"My name is Amal. I have a happy family made up of nine persons: three brothers, who are Ali, a soldier in Mosul; Mohammed, an engraver; and Mahmoud, a student. There are five sisters: Fatima, who helps my mother at home; Zainab; Amal; and my twin sisters, Duaa and Hibba. I am very proud of my mother because she is a great person, who works to bring us food because my father died when we were young."

Amal had been drawn into the preparations that absorbed all Baghdadis before the war had arrived. Her family had little money. For years, her mother had sold gum from a canvas mat in the street and now baked bread for neighbors; her crippled father, wounded six times in Iraq's wars with Iran and the United States, had died during the holy month of Ramadan in 1996 when the brakes of his car went out. Now, prewar inflation was testing their meager budget. A tray of 24 eggs had nearly tripled in price. Bakeries closed, and bread, becoming expensive, was scarce. In those days, they visited the market but found little they could afford. Some of their better-off neighbors had already left the apartment building, seeking safety in the countryside.

"We are supplying ourselves with water, and are scared that the water and electricity will be cut off. Duaa and Hibba are praying to God all the time, to avert war," Amal wrote of her younger twin sisters. "Fatima feels hopeful that war will not occur."

"Praise to God for everything," she wrote, "but I wish there wouldn't be a war."

Gradually, as the invasion neared, all the pieces of Amal's ordinary life began to fall away, one by one. She went to school with her sister Zainab, a reticent 15-year-old, to find only a handful of girls there. So they turned around and went home.

Her life reeling, Amal's mother wept repeatedly, sometimes uncontrollably. Often, at the sight of her tears, her daughters cried too. They looked to her for strength, and her weakness terrified them. Duaa and Hibba, both 11, would read the Koran, the Muslim holy book, for solace. Amal would stay hunched over her diary, recording the scene.

"Eyes are crying for everything precious," she wrote in one passage.

At 5:34 a.m. on March 20, their eyes hidden by the dark during another blackout, they listened to the war's anticipated arrival. Forty cruise missiles were fired from six U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf and precision-guided bombs were dropped on a bunker on Baghdad's outskirts where U.S. intelligence officials believed Hussein was hiding. A minute passed before air raid sirens began to wail, and more time still before the staccato answer of antiaircraft fire, skipping across a sky gray with the hints of an approaching dawn.

"Please, God, save us. Our hearts are full of fright," Amal wrote.

Her thoughts turned to Ali. "Please, God," she wrote simply, "protect my brother."