Mr. Abdullah, a shepherd, said that he had just returned from leading his sheep to pasture when Muhammad asked permission to play soccer with some friends in the lot across the road from the family’s home.

About 15 minutes later, around 3 p.m., Mr. Abdullah heard an explosion.

“Their bodies were completely torn apart by the blast,” Mr. Abdullah said. His son, he surmised, must have been sitting on the ground waiting for the ball to be passed to him, because he found Muhammad seated. An official at Kirkuk’s morgue later said that Muhammad’s head had been blown off.

That was just the latest tragedy to befall Mr. Abdullah’s family, and it has left him wondering if there is such a thing as a safe place to live here. He already had lost his two older sons as a result of the war, he said. First, Muazzaz, 19, was kidnapped and killed. Then last month, Saad, 21, was killed in a suicide bombing near the Kirkuk police academy, where he was a student.

“Now I lost my little son just as I lost his two brothers,” Mr. Abdullah said. “Today, I lost the last son. I have no one left except my daughter.”

Ahlan suffered abdominal injuries, but she is expected to survive.

Mr. Abdullah said that he had moved to Kirkuk in 1987 to flee the violence that the war between Iran and Iraq brought to his home city of Basra.