‘I’d ask him why he hates Muslims’

The young ages of some of the victims’ children may ease, for now, the task of explaining the inexplicable — why their fathers are gone. But inside the Ibrahima Barry household, there has nonetheless been confusion for the youngest of his four children, his 2- and 3-year-old sons.

Hours after learning his older brother was among the dead, Thierno Barry flew from his home in New York to his brother’s Sainte-Foy apartment, to be with Ibrahima’s wife and children. Since then, visitors have repeatedly commented on how much the brothers look alike — “It’s remarkable,” said one of Ibrahima’s co-workers to Thierno Barry Wednesday night.

But the boys, giggling as they played with strangers’ shoes down the hall, can’t tell the difference.

“They have been calling me dad,” Thierno Barry said.

Ibrahima’s two eldest, girls aged 6 and 13, have a better grasp of what’s happened. “We have tried to speak to them (as) diplomatically as possible,” he said.

It is not only the children of the dead who need comfort.

Hours after her mosque was reopened following the attacks, blood stains still on the carpets and a bullet hole visible in the wall, Yasima HadjSahraoui asked what she should tell her 13-year-old son and other kids from the mosque.

“Most of them were born here — they feel absolutely, totally Québécois. We have, every time, tried to teach them the good values of Islam, not to do bad things. What can we say to them?”

For now, Farhat Guemri has just been trying to listen. He was with his boys, 10 and 12, when shots rang out inside the mosque Sunday night. They hid together in an imam’s prayer room until the shooting stopped. He tried to protect them, both during the attack and after — covering their ears from the screams and telling them to close their eyes to carnage around them.

“But then police took us and we walked through the room and I couldn’t prevent it,” Guemri said.

Psychologists have been arranged for the boys at their school and, for now, their well-being is Guemri’s sole focus. Asked how he is doing, he has no answer, having not yet stopped to consider it.

“I want to make sure that my kids are all right,” he says. “We’ll see about how I’m feeling after that.”

The day after the shooting, he tried to stop his boys from watching television. But inevitably, they saw Alexandre Bissonnette’s face in the news. Guemri used it as an opportunity to talk.

“I asked my son what he would say if he could speak to this man,” Guemri said, his voice cracking. “And he told me: ‘Dad, I would ask him why he hates Muslims.’ ”