War Victims

When Mohammed Malek left home to collect firewood, his mother warned him never to stray from the road. He promised he wouldn't. But as the 15-year-old wandered through Kabul, Afghanistan, he spied some dried brush, ideal kindling, in a field. He gingerly stepped off the road and headed for it. There was an explosion, then another. A few months later, Foreign Service officer Mark Ward was visiting a hospital in the Afghan capital when he noticed a bright-eyed teen, the victim of a mine blast, in the corner.

When Mohammed Malek left home to collect firewood, his mother warned him never to stray from the road. He promised he wouldn't. But as the 15-year-old wandered through Kabul, Afghanistan, he spied some dried brush, ideal kindling, in a field. He gingerly stepped off the road and headed for it. There was an explosion, then another.

During a solemn 10 a.m. Mass at St. John's Cathedral on Sunday, Deacon Lester Mackenzie recited the names and ages of six Americans who had lost their lives in Iraq the previous week. Pray for them, he told the congregation, and for prisoners of war and those missing in action. Then Mackenzie, who is being ordained today as an Episcopal priest, called on parishioners "to pray for the Iraqi people who have died, whose names we do not know." St.

BUENOS AIRES -- Thousands of dissidents silenced under Argentina's military dictatorship -- tortured, executed and made to "disappear" in the so-called Dirty War against dissent -- are gaining new voice through poetry. A new book, "Poesia Diaria" (Everyday Poetry), tells the victims' story through the memories and verse of families who lost sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives.

Armed with missiles and heavy machine guns, a menacing French naval frigate appeared recently off Somalia's coast, providing cover as two heavily loaded ships piloted toward this sun-bleached village. By dawn the next morning, an onslaught was in full swing involving scores of small boats and hundreds of young men, who charged through the surf like soldiers at Normandy. But rather than guns, this brigade raced up the beach with heavy sacks of U.S.

From the back of a Jeep atop a Santa Catalina Island peak, Salee Allawe could see for miles in every direction Monday. "Look over there!" her father, Hussein Allawe Feras, said in Arabic. She followed his stare to vessels sliding across the blue ocean below. Her response was a dreamy smile. "Balmaat," she said. Boats. It was a simple pleasure, but that was the point. The 10-year-old girl lost her legs in what her family said was a U.S. air strike on the outskirts of Baghdad last November.

He is a shy boy, wincing from the stabbing pain of jagged shrapnel in his leg, a casualty of a war that ended 25 years before he was born. His name is To and he is 7, too young to understand why a weapon brought halfway around the world lay hidden in the dirt behind his wooden house, waiting to explode. It happened on a cold morning in mid-February while To was huddling with about 10 people near a small fire his father had built.

When a friend from the old neighborhood rang Abu Ali after sunrise one day this month to tell him that his house had been destroyed, the middle-aged Sunni confessed to himself that he felt happy. He turned to his wife in bed and told her that the Americans had flattened their home in the Washash neighborhood and killed some of the Shiite militia members who had kicked them out last September. They were people he had lived next to for years, people he had said hello to every day.

A car bomb blew up in the capital's Shiite Muslim neighborhood of Sadr City on Thursday, killing at least four people, as a new survey suggested that the civilian death toll from the war could be more than 1 million. The figure from ORB, a British polling agency that has conducted several surveys in Iraq, followed statements this week from the U.S. military defending itself against accusations it was trying to play down Iraqi deaths to make its strategy appear successful.

For more than half a century, Rachel Kane kept the memories at bay. There were her daughters to think of, twins born in a displaced persons camp in the aftermath of the second World War. Kane didn't want to burden them with tales of the Holocaust, of a husband shot to death by the Nazis, a baby who starved to death in the forest, an extended family wiped out in a mass execution.