Bomb’s Lasting Toll: Lost Laughter and Broken Lives

Johan Spanner for The New York Times

Qais Ataiwee Yaseen lost two sons, Abbas, 11, and Ali, 8, in the blast. “I’m like a dead man,” said Mr. Yaseen, who now lives alone in a small room. “I have no ambitions. I have no goals in life. I have lost everything.”

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: January 7, 2007

BAGHDAD, Jan. 6 — If the cost of this war is measured in human lives, one block in southeast Baghdad has paid more than its share.

On a hot morning two summers ago, 34 children were killed here in a flash of smoke and metal. They were scooping up candy thrown from an American Humvee. The suicide bomber’s truck never slowed down.

More than 3,000 Iraqis are dying every month in this war — roughly the total deaths in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or all the American troops killed since the war began. But behind the headlines and statistics, most of the war is experienced in Iraqi living rooms and on blocks like the one here, where families struggle with the intense pain of loss.

And while American war planners discuss the way ahead, Iraqis on this scarred block are stuck in the past on the morning of July 13, 2005, when time stopped and the war truly began for them. >>>cont

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