Tracing the Paths of 5 Who Died in a Storm of Gunfire

Ahmed began to read him the numbers: "2 . . . 9 . . . 9," he said, before choking up.

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It was the family's car.

At the morgue, Haitham Ahmed recognized his son's shoe and his wife's dental bridge.

'In the Hands of God'

Dressed in a black head-to-toe abaya, Sharif visited the police headquarters at Nisoor Square last week, carrying a folder filled with documents to prove her identity. She had come to pick up Khalil's motorcycle.

Two years ago, insurgents displaced them from their home in Baghdad's Dora neighborhood. They were living with Khalil's brother. Now, she has neither a pension nor savings, she said. "An entire family has been destroyed," she said, her eyes welling with pain.

She plans to file a complaint at a local police station in Yarmouk -- the first step to compensation, national police officials told her. But she has little faith in such promises. "Everything is in the hands of God," she said, staring out at the square.

Sahib Nasr, father of taxi driver Mahdi Sahib, has already filed complaints with the Yarmouk police and a local court. The 60-year-old patriarch said he wants compensation for his loss, nothing less. "I cannot work at this age," he said.

"I blame the government," added Mahdi's brother Ali, his voice suddenly brimming with anger. "If it wasn't for the government allowing Blackwater to go around free, they will not kill innocent people like that."

"We want Blackwater to be tried," he said.

Questions of Accountability

On Monday, inside his spacious cream-colored house in Baghdad's Khadisiya neighborhood, Firoz Fadhil Abbas questioned whether anyone would be held accountable for the shootings.

He has met several times with U.S. military investigators, and every time they apologized for his brother's death, he said. But such words have done little to ease the clan's loss.

"It looks like everything is back to normal. The company is back in operation," Abbas said. "And we've lost the head of our family. There's no justice here."

Mohammed Osama Fadhil, Osama's 14-year-old son, quietly listened to the conversation. Seated near him was his brother, Ahmed, a solemn 7-year-old. Finally, Mohammed spoke, focusing on Blackwater.

"They killed many others before," he said. "Have they done anything to help those people, so that we can expect something?"

Around the corner, his father's Volkswagen truck was parked in the driveway of a neighbor's house. A huge hole was gouged in the driver's door, surrounded by smaller bullet holes. On the top of the cab was another gaping hole, seemingly from powerful bullets fired from above. The windshield was shattered into hundreds of honeycomb patterns.

'They Were Innocent'

Ten minutes away, Kadhum's charred white sedan sat at a bus stop on the fringes of Nisoor Square. Her husband, Haitham Ahmed, said he wants it left there until justice is served.

In the days following the deaths of his wife and son, he petitioned Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to hold Blackwater accountable. The mild-mannered pathologist still has not been contacted by Iraqi or U.S. officials.

"They have killed my beloveds. They were innocent," he lamented on Wednesday. "We don't have any contacts with any party, any side. We are all doctors."

"What I want is the law to prevail," he added. "I hope that this act will not go without punishment."

There were opportunities, he said, for his family to flee Iraq. But he and his wife believed in the promise of a new Iraq. "I feel pain when I see doctors leaving Iraq," he said.

His son was going to follow in his footsteps. In his third year of medical school, the soccer-loving, multilingual Ahmed planned to become a surgeon.

Now, he said, his two other children, Mariam, 18, and Haidar, 16, are concerned about his safety. "Enough of the pain, enough of death in Iraq."

Mariam was born in the last phases of the Iran-Iraq conflict. Her eyes filling with tears, she said she wanted to leave: "I was born in one war, I don't want to die in another."

Special correspondent Saad al-Izzi contributed to this report.