Before we get swept away by Bush/Rumsfeld's next military adventure and our own need to figure out what to do, let us mourn Iraqi civilian casualties of the war, estimated (conservatively) to be 1,252 to 2,325 dead and 5,100 wounded, so far. Here are a few of the people.

March 24: Nada Abdallah was 16 years old and newly married. She and her husband were spending their honeymoon at a friend's farmhouse near Diyala Bridge, away from Baghdad and the bombs. After prayers on March 24, everyone was drinking tea in the living room when a bomb landed, killing Nada, another young woman, and 8-year-old Fateha. Eight others were injured by shrapnel, glass, and flying debris. Nada's husband could not stop crying.

March 26: Faris El Baur made cushions for car seats, working in his shop in Al Shaab market in north Baghdad. Because schools were closed for the war, his 11-year-old son Saif was helping him. When two rockets struck the market, father and son were crushed and burned. More than 20 other people died, including a mother and three small children, incinerated in their flipped-over car, and a young man named Tajir, decapitated in a water-heater shop.

March 28: 12-year-old Duha was buying pencils in Baghdad's Al Nasser market when a missile exploded, driving pieces of metal through crowds and house walls, amputating limbs and heads. Duha has a head injury and may lose his leg. 58 people were killed and 47 wounded, including many children.

March 29: Failing to realize that their village was inside a "kill box," a free-fire zone designated by the US military, cousins 12-year-old Ibrahim and 17-year-old Jala walked to their neighbor's house for lunch. A US pilot bombed and killed them.

March 30: With two friends, 14-year-old Arkan Daif was digging a trench in front of his Baghdad house to protect his family from bombing. A bomb tore off the back of his head. He was a boy "like a flower," his father said.

March 31-April 1: Azor Waled, 20, sat in Babylon Hospital with a wounded leg, holding her baby daughter, whose head was injured. Her other two daughters were dead, bombed near Hillah. Five-year-old Nader stepped on a cluster bomblet that blew out his left eye. Showers of US cluster bombs killed 60 Hillah civilians and wounded 460 over that two-day period.

April 1: Razek al-Khataj was driving north with 15 members of his family to escape fierce fighting in Nasiyirah. A rocket from an Apache helicopter blew their truck apart. Razek lost his wife, six children, his father and mother, his three brothers, and their wives.

April 2: Eight-year-old Aisha Ahmed was playing in the garden when a missile struck her family's farm in Radwaniyeh, near Bagdad airport. Her four-year-old brother died. Her mother, father, older brother, and sisters were critically injured. Aisha lost an eye; her face and body were peppered with shrapnel. She kept asking, "Mommy! Where is my mommy?"

April 5: Abid Hamoodi invited his three grown children and their families to stay with him in his strong concrete house in Basra. Anglo-American forces bombed and the walls collapsed, killing Abid's wife and nine other family members. He saved a daughter and two of her children.

April 6: Nadia Khalaf, 33, had just finished her psychology PhD. She and her sister were at home in Baghdad, talking and laughing, when a missile came through their window and drove Nadia's heart out through her chest.

April 7: Sena Hassad, 36, and her daughters Rana, 10, and seven-year-old Maria, lived in Mansour neighborhood, Baghdad. Neighbors tried in vain to help Sena's husband, Abdil, dig his family out of the rubble created by four 2000-pound precision-guided bombs. [Editor's note: the US military dropped these bombs on three houses in a residential neighborhood, ostensibly in an attempt on Saddam Hussein's life; there is now videotaped evidence and eyewitness testimony that Saddam survived the attack, but at least a dozen civilians--including a baby--did not.]

April 8: In Baladiyat, Baghdad's eastern edge, a US plane fired at the home of Wael Sabah, her 12-year-old daughter Noor, and her four-year-old son Abdel. They died in Kindi hospital while another son, stunned, sat on the floor beside his mother in a puddle of her blood. Nearby, in the hospital, two-year-old Ali Najour lay soaked in blood with a tube in his nose. Both his parents had been killed. And 11-year-old Safa Karim died slowly, bleeding internally from a bomb fragment in her stomach and writhing in pain.

April 9: Children were playing in an olive tree grove near the remote northern village of Fathlia. When bombs fell, six-year-old Hansa Omar was decapitated, her sister Jasim also died, and their friend, ten-year-old Ali Ramzi, was crushed against a tree. Abu Salam Gafur, a 16-year-old shepherd, was killed with his sheep.

--Kate Gessert writes "Undercovered" in print and on the web for the Eugene Weekly. Undercovered is a monthly collection of US war and other international news not covered by most US press.

SOURCES: Robert Fisk of the Independent, www.iraqbodycount.net, www.antiwar.com, www.ccmep.org, Iraq Peace Team, Guardian, Washington Post, Sydney Morning Herald, Counterpunch, Agence France Presse, Alternet, Asia Times, Reuters, Mirror, Associated Press, BBC.