The one I wanted to wrap in my arms and bring home was Nebras. I didn’t even know her name when I went back to Iraq, shortly after the assault on Baghdad. I was armed only with a photo of a beggar touching her nose with her tongue. I had met her a few months before, when I’d traveled to Iraq with a women’s delegation, just five weeks before the U.S. bombings and invasion. Unfazed by impending disaster, the little girl, old enough to be in primary school, had begged for handouts in a popular market.
