Dunya's WAR: Fallujah, Feb 2004.
By Stephen Grey, Falluja.
THE WAR for little Dunya Hamid began and ended in a warm afternoon last
autumn. She was playing with her sisters in a dusty palm grove when the
American army opened fire on her hamlet.
Just two years old, Dunya had no words to utter but ”mama”’ and ”dadda,”
when just after 4pm, the soldiers approached her village from two sides in
armoured Humvees cars. Dunya ran for safety but she was cut down, shot in
the head with a machine gun bullet before she could reach the back door of
the family’s squat four-bedroomed bungalow.
Her sister, Manal, aged seven, who was injured from shrapnel, recalled: “I
saw Dunya playing outside. When she heard the shooting she wanted to go
inside but then I saw her falling to the ground. Then I was hit. I didn’t
feel anything bu I saw my blood come out. We were very afraid.”
In the fast-moving pace of events in Iraq, Dunya’s death and the injuries of
four other children in the hamlet merited just a brief paragraph in
newspaper accounts of a bloody day of fighting between American forces and
guerrilla fighters. A day earlier, in the same town of Fallujah, US troops
also shot dead ten Iraqi policemen by mistake. (more…)
