OnIslam.net

CAIRO – Six years after Samar Hassan lost her parents, who were killed in front of her by US troops, the Iraqi young girl still suffers war trauma that visited thousands of Iraqis since the war erupted eight years ago.

“My brother was sick, and we were taking him to the hospital and on the way back, this happened,” Samar told the New York Times on Saturday, May 7.

“We just heard bullets. My mother and father were killed, just like that.”

Reflecting the untold horrors of eight-years US-led war on Iraq, Samar’s story is frozen in history by an image taken to her seconds after American soldiers opened fire on her family’s car in the northern town of Tal Afar in January 2005.

The photo for Samar, then 5 years old, showed her screaming and splattered in blood, mostly of her parents, shocking the world on the war civilian casualties.

Thought setting in the back with her brother and three of her siblings, US soldiers in the 25th Infantry

Division opened fire, killing her father and mother and said that they suspected they were suicide car bombers.

Samar, almost 12-year-old now, lives the outskirts of Mosul in a two-story house with four other families, mostly relatives.

Losing her brother Rakan, who died when an insurgent attack badly damaged the house, she currently lives with her older sister, Intisar, and her husband, an unemployed former police officer.

Intisar’s husband, Nathir Bashir Ali, says that the family could not pass the accident psychological trauma, in a country with a failing health system.

“I’ve taken them many times to the hospital, where they get pills” for emotional problems, Mr. Ali said. “All of them take pills.”

He says Samar’s 8-year-old brother, Muhammad, talks to himself when he is alone.

“When we go out and see a family, they get sad,” he said.

Sometimes he finds the children in a room together, crying.

“When they remember the accident, it’s like they just died.”

Under George W. Bush’s administration, the US invaded Iraq in 2003 to oust the Saddam Hussein regime on claims of possessing weapons of mass destruction, a claim never proved true.

Since the 2003 US invasion, Iraq has plunged into abyss with overlapping civil conflicts that have left tens of thousands of civilians dead.

War Grieves

The photo for Samar, then 5 years old, showed her screaming and splattered in blood, mostly of her parents.

Showing the untold story of civilian casualties, the photo of Samar was one of the few that could stand out in history to tell the story of US invasion.

“It really seems to say something of what’s going on at the time,” Liam Kennedy, a professor at University College Dublin who researches conflict photography, told the New York Times.

“All the arbitrariness of the violence that was going on at that time is summed up by that girl.”

The photo of Samar, a visual testimony to shooting of innocent civilians at American checkpoints, reached the Pentagon as it considered ways to reduce civilian casualties.

Taken by Chris Hondros, the Getty Images photographer recently killed on the front lines in Misurata, Libya, the image caused the military to ask him to leave his embed assignment in the American unit.

Hondros spoke about the photograph in a 2007 interview with the syndicated news program “Democracy Now.”

“I think one of the reasons the photo had this sort of resonance that it does is because it has a sort of empty feeling,” he said.

“You know, the poor girl, all alone in the world now, just standing there in the dark.”

Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Middle East and North Africa division for Human Rights Watch, keeps a copy of the photo on a bulletin board in her office in New York as a testimony to horrors of war.

“At the time, I thought it captured perfectly the horrors of the war that was not really understood by Americans,” she said.

“Everything in that girl’s face symbolized what I felt all Iraqis must feel.”

“I kept thinking, ‘I wonder what life will be like for this girl?’ ”

Though she has never seen the photo before this week, Samar still remembers the moment it was shot.

She said she understood that it showed the world “the sad thing that is happening in Iraq.”