I could fill the blog with these every day, but here are two that are particularly poignant. From the Times on March 26:

Ahmed Ali [is] a grizzled 72-year old carpenter who came for help getting his food ration basket. Mr. Ali closed his carpentry shop because there was no electricity. Known throughout Adhamiya for his craftsmanship, he was famous for making an Arab version of the lute for local musicians.

His eldest son was killed a year ago. When he collected the body at the morgue, he found that holes had been drilled through his son’s joints, a form of torture that is a mark of Shiite militias. Last summer, his younger son was kidnapped near the neighborhood.

He leaned forward slightly on his cane and looked hard at Mr. Daoud as he tried to explain the depth of his losses: the carpentry shop, his food rations, his family. “I made lutes and sometimes I played, but my fingers are numb now,” he said. “I cannot play. I want only to find my kidnapped son.”

And then from the Australian, this unspeakable story:

Near the shops, a group of children -- Sunni and Shia -- were playing football on an empty site. As Mr Amer, his wife and brother walked past, two cars pulled up. Four or five men in tracksuits got out and opened their car boots. They pulled out belt-fed BKC machineguns, a weapon known in Iraq as "the harvester" for its ability to kill many people quickly.

"We heard the shooting of the machineguns. It was so loud and continuous we thought they were targeting us," the 28-year-old Shia man said, his eyes red and brimming with pain.

But they were not the targets. "I started looking, and they were shooting the kids," he said. "Eight of the kids already fell on the ground. The guys kept shooting, they just wanted to make sure everyone was dead."