JALALABAD, Afghanistan — On the small whiteboard above the little girl’s hospital bed, in the medical bills that she had no one left to pay, and in the news reports about a shattered toddler’s struggle to survive, she was called Fereshta — the Persian word for angel.

No one knew her real name.

A shepherd had carried the child, around 2 years old, to a hospital in Kabul in October. Most of her limbs were broken and her skull was fractured by a roadside bomb in eastern Afghanistan, a blast that had wiped out most of her family.

Despite a month of treatment, she never emerged from a coma and the skull fracture proved fatal.

Only when her little body — shrouded in white from head to toe — made its final journey back to her hometown in Nangarhar Province, and only after the villagers there crosschecked a list of all her dead brothers and sisters, did her real name become known: Sima.