CHILDREN (CONT)

are trying to get a settlement for my nieces with the Australian company whose people shot their mother. But they are not liable under Iraqi law. I want a proper settlement by law - through lawyers - not just a cash handout, which is the way Americans do things in Iraq."

Like so many Armenian families, the Manouks are overshadowed by a history of mass murder. During the Armenian genocide of 1915, perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks, Paul Manouk's grandfather - the three Iraqi orphans' great-grandfather - was taken from his family by Turkish policemen in a line of other men and never seen again. His father, then just six years old, survived along with his mother. "But my father's sister, we believe, was taken by a Kurdish man as his wife," Mr Manouk said.

"My grandfather's two other sisters had a terrible fate. Their legs had swollen on the long march south from their home in Besni, near Marash, and they could not keep walking, so my grandmother took the decision to leave them on the roadside and keep the son so that our 'line' would survive. The two little girls were never seen again."

The family had almost reached the border of the Ottoman province of Mesopotamia - modern-day Iraq - on the long march of ethnic cleansing when, like tens of thousands other Armenians, they lost their loved ones through exhaustion and starvation. A million-and-a-half Armenians died in the genocide.

After the British occupation of Iraq in 1917, British troops escorted the remains of the Manouk family to Basra where one of the aunts looking after the three Awanis sisters still lives.

Their father, Azad Awanis, died after a heart operation in 2004. Mrs Awanis was driving her Oldsmobile taxi through the dangerous streets of Baghdad to earn money for her family after her husband's death, little realising that her new job - and a bunch of trigger-happy mercenaries - would orphan her children.

Paul Manouk met his British wife in Edinburgh in 1974, when he was studying for a PhD in medicine. A normally imperturbable man, he describes himself as still being in a state of shock at the killing of his younger sister.

"I wonder what her face was like when she died. She wasn't in a bad area. Marou was coming back from church when she was shot, along with her friend. Another woman, in the back of the car, was wounded." A 15-year-old boy survived. According to Mr Manouk, his sister was "riddled with bullets from the chest upwards".

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