An Uncertain Dawn On a Scarred Street

As Iraq entered a third year of war, those words acknowledging her powerlessness seemed to take on new meaning. The script was already written. People like Karima sat as spectators, watching a performance.

Violence, now mundane, was reshaping their lives. Its pervasiveness was breeding distrust and fear as amorphous as Hussein's repression was pervasive.

"While I was downstairs, my brother Mahmoud came and said the road was blocked. Everyone was asking why and some said they had arrested terrorists," Amal wrote on July 5. "The truth however was that police had found a bag, and at first thought there was a bomb inside it, but in fact they found a girl of 16 years -- dead, beheaded, and naked. She was thrown on the street, inside a bag, raped by someone unknown."

"Death is all we hear in the news everyday," she wrote in another entry, a few pages later. "Death, slaughter, murder, kidnappings and robberies. Nobody knows why."

At times in the summer, Amal's street would assume a veneer of normalcy. Lines of cars still stretched miles from gas stations. But markets along the sun-soaked sidewalk overflowed with goods piled on rickety stands: socks imported from China and T-shirts from Syria. Down the street were children's toys. There was a "Super Mega Heavy Metal Fighter" action figure and a doll that, when squeezed, played "It's a Small World."

In the family's apartment, though, the daily mayhem cast a long shadow. Weeks after the Karrada bombing, Amal and her siblings recalled its scenes in almost photographic detail.

"The dead have become cheap," Mahmoud, the 11-year-old, said dispassionately.

He recalled one piece of burning shrapnel that sliced through five people. Abu Karrar, he remembered, stumbled across the street, his shirt bloodied. Then he died. A bone of Abbas Rubaie's leg flared through his pants. The flesh of another neighbor's arm was seared off. A car's engine, the boy said, fell on top of a corpse.

"Only the best people die," Mahmoud said. "They always pick the best fruit."

In her diary, Amal recounted the police raids that followed, as officers forced their way into apartments and searched for suspects. She and her sisters watched passively, in silence. Two people were arrested; neighbors said they were innocent, "poor laborers at a soap factory." More raids ensued that summer, sometimes every few days.

"God knows who is telling the truth or not these days," Amal wrote in July. "No one has trust in anybody else, whether the police, the National Guard or even our own folks."

Liberation and Contradiction

In 2004, a year after the invasion, Amal had sat with her mother, confused about occupation and liberation, unsure about the fortunes of her country. Some blamed the Americans for their plight, she said then; others blamed Hussein, or even the Iraqis themselves.