By Leila Fadel,Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq – A gaggle of boys who played soccer together in the eastern Baghdad neighborhood are gone.

A 10-year-old twin is without his other half.

One whole family disappeared, their home destroyed by a suicide blast.

On Thursday, the sobs of the grief-stricken filled the air, mourning those who were killed when an SUV exploded the day before in a crowd of Iraqi children who had gathered to accept candy, gifts and water from an American military patrol. Most of the 40 people who died in the suicide bombing were children and teenagers. A U.S. soldier perished as well.

In every home for blocks Thursday, distraught parents said that at least one child was dead.

Doors of homes opened, offering glimpses of a sea of women in traditional black gowns crying together inside as little girls passed precious cold drinking water to their guests. Christian, Shiite Muslim and Sunni Muslim women sat cross-legged throughout the neighborhood, calling for their dead sons and daughters.

A coffin was tied to the top of a van. Women screamed inside the vehicle, while a father hysterically called, “My son, my son!”

Some men lined up in funeral tents near the bombing’s 10-foot-crater, which had been filled with dirt but couldn’t cover a landscape scarred by shrapnel, broken glass and blood.

Thursday was supposed to have been a celebration at one small Sunni home.

A little white gown called a dishdasha, threaded with gold, hung on the door. Karima Jameel Sabri’s 5-year-old son, Ahmed Jassim, was to have been circumcised according to Islamic practice.

His mother had expected to throw chocolates at him in his new traditional garment. Instead, Sabri scratched her face until it bled, beat her chest and described the image of her son’s head dangling from the curb.

Her grief was compounded that day when she found her 8-year-old son, Mohammed, on the other side of the road covered by dead bodies. The new tracksuit he was wearing had burned away, his arms and legs were gone and his face was unrecognizable.

But a mother knows.

Only he had the small birthmark at the back of his head, perfect little teeth and purple underwear.

“There is fire in my heart, oh mother,” she screamed and slapped her face. “They’d been kissing me in the morning, my two boys.”

A taped poster on the jagged concrete wall above the mourning women read, “One Iraq, a promising future,” in a home where two futures were lost.

The mothers blamed the American soldiers and the Iraqi government for failing to protect their children.

“Bring me the dishdasha,” Sabri cried, and her daughter handed her the pure white gown. She crumpled it between her hands.

“Where shall I find my sons?” she cried. “I carried them and I was covered in blood. Who do I throw the chocolates on?”

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Across the street, a woman with disheveled blond hair sat beneath portraits of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Faisa Emmanuel Michael’s eyes were tired and her face red from crying.

All day and night Wednesday, she had searched for her 10-year-old son, Yousef Adel Saleem, among the charred body parts, scattered children’s slippers and burned remnants of the SUV. She wandered the bloodstained pavement until 4 a.m. She checked the hospitals.

“I wish I could see him and bury him,” she said. “Then I can rest.”

At a Shiite home nearby, two women who live together had lost their sons. One sat stunned, unable to rid herself of the image of her child’s burned face. She had identified him by his rounded fingernail. Next to her, another woman screamed, “Oh mother, where is my son? Where is my son?”

Her only child was gone, too.

The grief stretched all the way to the southern city of Najaf, where 12 children were taken to be buried in one of the holiest cities for Shiites.

A woman kissed the sands that covered her 7-year-old son’s wooden coffin. The family of five had driven more than two hours to bury him near the grave of Imam Ali, one of the holiest figures in Shiite Islam.

Back in the eastern Baghdad neighborhood, anger hung in the air in a place where families struggle to eat.

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No one wanted the blame for the devastation.

The group al-Qaida in Iraq denied involvement in an Internet statement. The military said U.S. soldiers weren’t passing out anything at the time of the bombing, and condemned the attack on civilians.

But the children are gone, and no one can bring them back.

“God gave them to me,” Karima Sabri said. “Oh mother. The time has betrayed me and left me alone.”

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(Knight Ridder Newspapers special correspondents Qassim Mohammed and Huda Ahmed contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2005, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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AP-NY-07-14-05 1811EDT

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