BAGHDAD, Iraq – The drive from her parents' house to her own was already somber because the family was mourning the loss of her brother, who was mysteriously killed.
Then Nawal Hassan heard more grim news on the car radio: The Shiite Buratha mosque was bombed, killing dozens of worshippers.
“Now, they'll fight each other. The Shiite mosque was attacked, so a Sunni mosque will be attacked,” Hassan said she told her husband. “Tit for tat.”
For Hassan, every blow in Iraq's increasing sectarian violence hits home: She is a Sunni, her husband is a Shiite.
In the midst of the attacks and reprisals that threaten to drag the country into a civil war, mixed households like Hassan's offer a bright spot.
But the rising heat at times seeps in, putting a strain on some such marriages.
The news of Friday's bombing at the Buratha mosque was far from uncommon. A Feb. 22 bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra sparked revenge attacks on Sunni mosques and a spate of sectarian killings.
But the killings were going on well before the Samarra attack. Hassan's brother went out to put gas in his car in February and was never seen again.
The family finally got word that his body was at a morgue in Baghdad's Shiite Sadr city neighborhood. There, they were told that the body was found with three bullets to the head and was buried when no one claimed it.
“This is the most difficult part, that we couldn't even see the body or bury it,” Hassan said.
Hassan, 37, said she would never know for sure who kidnapped her brother, but she believes he was killed by Shiite militias because he is a Sunni.
Her husband, 42-year-old Hassan Mohammed, dismissed the theory.
“This could have been a theft or maybe it was the resistance,” he said, using the term that refers to Sunni insurgents.
Mohammed, his checkered shirt and his hands blackened after a day at work repairing cars, blamed the violence on the Americans and the Iraqi government for failing to provide security.
His wife accuses Shiite Iran of fanning the flames of sectarianism and the Americans of sowing divisions.
The Sunni-Shiite split originated in a dispute over the succession in the leadership of Muslims following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century.
While both sects hold to the basic tenets of Islam, they have separate schools of Islamic law and there are many differences – big and small – in their rituals.
In interviews before and after the Samarra explosion, Hassan and Mohammed maintained the issue hardly comes up in their marriage.
So where do the kids stand?
Mohammed's 18-year-old son follows his father and their five daughters the mother.
The couple's 17-year-old daughter, Marwa, was confused when asked if she was a Sunni or a Shiite.
“I am a Sunni. No, I am a Shiite because my father is a Shiite, but I believe that the Sunni thought is true.”
Differences on the political scene also send ripples into their home.
In Iraq's first democratic elections in decades – in January 2005 – Mohammed voted for a clerical-backed Shiite list, while his wife boycotted the vote like many Sunnis.
