From the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.
Ayat Salah, six, stopped talking after she found a headless body in front of her house in Baghdad as she set off for school.
“Ayat had kissed me and her father goodbye in the morning as usual,” said her mother. “Then she left the house, and suddenly we heard her scream and saw she had fainted. She hasn’t spoken a word since.”
Shrooq Mustafa was five years old when she saw militants behead her father in front of her. He worked as a translator for American troops in Baghdad. Her father’s blood splashed all over the girl’s pink dress, and the armed men left her behind with the dead body of her father, screaming and in a state of shock.