Dear Doha Diary

It was a quiet, star filled January night in 2017 and  8 year old Nawar Al Awlaki was asleep with her mother in her Uncle's house in Yakla, a rural village in the mountains of Al Bayda, a region of South Yemen.  Suddenly she was woken by the sound of gunfire and she instinctively went to hide. Her neighbours were under attack and were being killed as they fled their homes, including the Ameri family with three children -   Aisha, 4, Hussein, 5 and  Khadija, 7.   Nawar's home then came under attack and she was shot in the neck by a bullet that came through the window.  Despite her own assurances to her mother not to worry, she died two hours later from a loss of blood.   25 civilians died that night, including 9 children under the age of 13, one of them a 3 month old boy and a pregnant woman who was shot in the stomach. The photo below shows some of the children who survived that terrible night, haunted by the loss of their family members and the horr