She did not recognize the man who drove, or the men squashed into two rows of seats behind him, but she recognized the young woman sitting beside the driver. The mother had never before seen the young woman, but she recognized her from the rumour slipping through the villages. It had been brought, as surely as the leaves of autumn eddied from the orchards, by nomads. She saw the young woman’s face, the combat fatigues on her upper body, the rifle against her shoulder, and the chest harness to which the grenades were hooked. All the mothers in her village had heard the whispered rumour of the young woman who had come from the north, many days’ walk away, where the mountains were highest.

She shouted at the limit of her voice: ‘Punish them. Punish them for what they have done to me.’

More vehicles passed.

Her child’s father and brothers were pushing the clods of wet soil and the stones back into the pit. Then the father stood and held up the torch so that the brothers might better see stones to heap on top of the shallow grave to protect it against wild dogs and foxes.

There should have been a man of God there, but they lived too far from any mosque to receive that comfort. There should have been neighbours and friends and cousins, but they were too close to the positions of the Iraqi murderers and the front line of their bunkers for any but the close family to venture into the darkness. The boys gasped under the weight of the stones.

The light of their father’s torch caught the last vehicle in the convoy. It had a closed cab and an open back in which were huddled men in fighting clothes who clutched weapons to their bodies. The men saw the mother, they saw the father and the brothers, they saw the stones that marked the grave, and all but one raised their fists, clenched, in a gesture of sympathy.

One man, squatting in the back of the last vehicle, was different.