Reflexively, her hands slapped her face. They clawed, until her nails drew blood. ‘If I had only known from the first day!’ she cried. The horror of this war is its numbers, frozen in the portraits at the morgue: an infant’s eyes sealed shut and a woman’s hair combed in blood and ash. ‘Files tossed on the shelves,’ a policeman called the dead, and that very anonymity lends itself to the war’s name here — al-ahdath, or the events.
— The unmatched, the incandescent Anthony Shadid, who died in Syria today. “Restoring Names to War’s Unknown Casualties.” The New York Times, Aug. 30, 2010.
