Ali and Rasmiyeh Kathem clutched their seven children as the firestorm approached their single-storey concrete house. When the windows exploded they realised they had to get out.

Muntather, their 18-year-old son, took charge of his three younger brothers and a sister on the back seat of Ali’s taxi. Rasmiyeh squeezed her two youngest daughters on her lap in the front.

Mayhem had descended on this district of Baghdad, as the Americans closed in, because it was full of military facilities. Helicopters swooped across the dawn sky.

Up ahead, two lorries were rolling up the road in convoy. Ali thought their high sides could protect his car. He overtook the second lorry and swerved in behind the first. It did not occur to him that they might be the helicopters’ targets.

The firestorm caught up with the fleeing family in a white-hot explosion. By the time the thunderous roar had faded away, Ali and Rasmiyeh were dead and all but two of their children were dying.

I SAW her immediately: a tiny figure in the Iraqi hospital ward, swathed in bandages like a miniature mummy and moaning softly. Her grandmother was fanning her with a piece of cardboard. Tears ran down the old woman’s face.

“Cold . . . cold,” the little figure whimpered. “Cover me up, Mama. Baba \, where are you? I’m cold.”

The doctor was clinical. This three-year-old patient had sustained deep second- and third-degree burns to her face, back, arms and legs, he said, and contusions to the right arm and both legs. There were already signs of septicaemia. If she could not be transferred from his non-sterile ward into a more appropriate environment, she would die.

The ferocity of my reaction made me shudder. Steve, my husband, placed a hand on my shoulder and I met his eyes. He knew that I was prone to extremes of emotion when I was run down and that, like a lot of foreign correspondents, I always struggled to cope with the sight of a child hurt in war — like now, a few days after the invasion of Iraq.

He realised this encounter was especially poignant for me. The little girl was calling for a mother who would never come. And I had longed for a daughter who would never appear. I was unprepared for how strongly I would respond as a childless woman to this motherless child.

The girl’s grandmother motioned me into the corridor where she recounted the family tragedy. The child’s name was Zahra. Her mother had hurled her and her baby sister Hawra through a window of their burning car after it was hit by a missile as they fled their home. The baby was virtually uninjured. Their eldest brother had survived long enough to tell doctors the story.

My instructions that day were to find a suitable orphan for a newspaper campaign to raise money for all children injured in the war. Zahra was the one. Yet I could not merely report this. I resolved I would use my paper’s appeal to rescue Zahra as well as raising money for the others. God knows, Zahra needed help more than any of them.

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