Ahmad clearly remembers the mingled excitement and terror he felt when the Americans began to bomb his city. “We were just kids but we were excited that they were going to come and get rid of Saddam,” he says. He and his siblings hid under furniture as the “shock and awe” bombardment began, marvelling at “the red fire in the sky” as missiles met their targets on the morning of March 20.
Three months later, it was his own father who would be the mistaken fatal target of the invaders, when nervous American soldiers unleashed gunfire at a checkpoint in Sadr City, the vast shanty town in Baghdad where his family lived. The following year, their home was all but destroyed by an American tank
