For Iraqi family, scars slow to heal
Casualties of war struggling amid poverty, grief
By Thanassis Cambanis, Globe Staff July 4, 2005
BAGHDAD -- Benin Hamid, now a coquettish 4-year-old, swings the stuffed yellow duck that has been her constant companion in a short life punctuated by an invasion and two uprisings that forced her and her family to flee their home in Sadr City.
She has never named the duck, and it is not clear how well she remembers her older brother and her two sisters, who were killed with her aunt, on the catastrophic day in April 2003 when a mortar struck the house.
Life goes on in the Hamid household, a two-story jumble of rooms that contains four scarred families whose uneven progress since the US invasion mirrors the struggles of many in the Shi'ite Muslim slum where they live.
