Posted on 11/20/2009 7:12:48 AM PST by Notoriously Conservative
We shut the aircraft down and what we saw was 350 plus people ranging in ages from 6 months to old and gray standing silently at a fence watching our every movement. I walked around the nose of my aircraft a mere 150 feet away from this crowd, I gave a simple smile and raised my arm up over my head and was greeted with the most substantial roar of levity that I have ever heard in my life. 350 plus people were cheering. Not because I play an instrument in some notable band, acted in a big Hollywood movie, or wrote some famous novel. They were cheering because I am part of something bigger than that. I am part of a team made up of men and women who all wear a uniform of some kind symbolized by a colorful patch known as the Stars and Stripes. A team that helped liberate an entire culture of people almost killed off because they were different. Like the Americans were to the Jews we are to the Kurds.
Before I ramble anymore about this occasion I feel that I am obligated to expose you to what happened to these people. Halajba, the town we flew too, sits directly on the Iranian border. In fact almost a one quarter of the town is in Iran. During the 1980s there was a conflict known as the Iran/Iraq war. This city was at the frontlines of this battle. Historically speaking the Kurdish people have been oppressed and looked down upon by their Arab counterparts in Iraq because they are not Arabic. They are different. They are a melting pot of many different beliefs; their cultural heritage stems across every religion known to man. This diversity sets them apart and makes them great. Well Islamic Arabs known as Sunni and Shia don't have a good history of liking people who are different. The perfect illustration of this is the fact that the Sunni and Shia can't even agree on their own religion. Minor differences between these two branches such as how many times a day they pray, certain important figures in their history, and different holidays is grounds enough for them to not even like each other. Now the Kurds have always been at the bottom of this hierarchy; Saddam was a Sunni and for many years the Sunni Arabs had a good life. The Shia and Kurds were oppressed by this regime quite fiercely with the The Kurds receiving the brunt of it. During the Iran/Iraq war Saddam bombed many cities like this without remorse simply because they were Kurdish. Many ruined cityscapes still litter this country side from that conflict. If that wasn't enough in 1987 Saddam organized an operation completely aimed at eradicating or otherwise imprisoning every Kurd in the country. It began with interment into concentration style camps outside of the major cities. This was followed by the bombing of Kurdish cities. All this climaxed in 1988 when Saddam launched a massive chemical weapons attack which left over 5,000 fatalities in Halajba alone. The final toll of Kurdish fatalities ranged from 300,000 to 500,000 killed. Thousands more wounded and imprisoned. All this was because they were different.
Today was a side of the war that I had never before seen. I saw the fighting last time I was here. The tracers illuminating the night skies, the bombs and hellfires being dropped on insurgents while inserting fresh troops and pulling out the dead and wounded ones. I saw the fear and terror that people can leash upon one another. The awesome horrific sight of what firepower can do to soft skin targets of both friendlies and enemies. I was prepared to go to war again. To see and experience those horrific moments not often spoken about by those who were there. Today I stood in awe as I was thanked, not by a passerby at the airport or some restaurant I was eating at, but by an entire nation of people that we as a team helped save and preserve. Because of our efforts, which started after the first Gulf War to present, these people have emerged as a supreme culture of individuals at once on the brink of extinction. This is no longer a war as far as a traditional definition would go; it is about the people of Iraq now. It's not about bullets and bombs but handshakes and smiles. We have done our job and we did it well and I don't care what any peace loving tree hugging hippy says after watching CNN because today I was personally thanked by more people of another country then that of my own country. If that is not a testament to the job that we have done here than I do not know what is. These are free people who have lived with 3,000 years of oppression. They are free because of our efforts. They are free because of our sacrifice.
Feel free to pass this story and pictures along to every American. It is our duty to make sure that they know the truth about what we are doing over here and the results of those efforts. The liberal media would try and disgrace our sacrifice or otherwise downplay the importance of our mission in Iraq and that is just not fair to the fighting men and women of the United States of America. This is a reminder to those liberal hippies that sometimes there are people in this world who need a good ass kicking to help save the little guy and no one does it better than an American Soldier. Hooah!
SGT Christopher A. Hoffert Afghanistan '04-'05, Iraq '06-'07, and '09-'10 Alpha Company 3rd Battalion 25th Combat Aviation Brigade FOB Diamondback, Iraq 3 Oct 2009
More pictures and videos on site. Notoriously Conservative
Thank you for your service Sgt. Hoffert. God Bless You And Protect You!
God Bless Our Troops!!!
Godspeed to our troops.
Good luck and Godspeed Seargent.
Thanks for saying this as well.
Thank you for your service and message. Prayers.
Awesome.
Thanksabunch!
The USA spreads liberty and freedom to people enslaved.
Did the UN liberate the Kurds? No, but they and the world snobs, leftists, elitist hypocrites sure do trash the US of A. God bless our troops.
These poor souls suffered such a horrible genocide at the hands of Saddam. They KNOW who the good guys are.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Halajba
The Great Terror In northern Iraq, there is new evidence of Saddam Husseins genocidal war on the Kurdsand of his possible ties to Al Qaeda
by Jeffrey Goldberg March 25, 2002
Excerpt:
In the late morning of March 16, 1988, an Iraqi Air Force helicopter appeared over the city of Halabja, which is about fifteen miles from the border with Iran. The Iran-Iraq War was then in its eighth year, and Halabja was near the front lines. At the time, the city was home to roughly eighty thousand Kurds, who were well accustomed to the proximity of violence to ordinary life.
Like most of Iraqi Kurdistan, Halabja was in perpetual revolt against the regime of Saddam Hussein, and its inhabitants were supporters of the peshmerga, the Kurdish fighters whose name means those who face death.
A young woman named Nasreen Abdel Qadir Muhammad was outside her familys house, preparing food, when she saw the helicopter. The Iranians and the peshmerga had just attacked Iraqi military outposts around Halabja, forcing Saddams soldiers to retreat.
Iranian Revolutionary Guards then infiltrated the city, and the residents assumed that an Iraqi counterattack was imminent. Nasreen and her family expected to spend yet another day in their cellar, which was crude and dark but solid enough to withstand artillery shelling, and even napalm.
At about ten oclock, maybe closer to ten-thirty, I saw the helicopter, Nasreen told me. It was not attacking, though. There were men inside it, taking pictures. One had a regular camera, and the other held what looked like a video camera. They were coming very close. Then they went away.
Nasreen thought that the sight was strange, but she was preoccupied with lunch; she and her sister Rangeen were preparing rice, bread, and beans for the thirty or forty relatives who were taking shelter in the cellar. Rangeen was fifteen at the time. Nasreen was just sixteen, but her father had married her off several months earlier, to a cousin, a thirty-year-old physicians assistant named Bakhtiar Abdul Aziz.
Halabja is a conservative place, and many more women wear the veil than in the more cosmopolitan Kurdish cities to the northwest and the Arab cities to the south.
The bombardment began shortly before eleven.
The Iraqi Army, positioned on the main road from the nearby town of Sayid Sadiq, fired artillery shells into Halabja, and the Air Force began dropping what is thought to have been napalm on the town, especially the northern area. Nasreen and Rangeen rushed to the cellar. Nasreen prayed that Bakhtiar, who was then outside the city, would find shelter.
The attack had ebbed by about two oclock, and Nasreen made her way carefully upstairs to the kitchen, to get the food for the family. At the end of the bombing, the sound changed, she said. It wasnt so loud. It was like pieces of metal just dropping without exploding. We didnt know why it was so quiet.
A short distance away, in a neighborhood still called the Julakan, or Jewish quarter, even though Halabjas Jews left for Israel in the nineteen-fifties, a middle-aged man named Muhammad came up from his own cellar and saw an unusual sight: A helicopter had come back to the town, and the soldiers were throwing white pieces of paper out the side. In retrospect, he understood that they were measuring wind speed and direction. Nearby, a man named Awat Omer, who was twenty at the time, was overwhelmed by a smell of garlic and apples.
~~~~
There was no escape .. final death toll: 300-500,000!
~~PING!
BTTT
Must see PING for all who support our fabulous Military!
Thank you for your service and sacrifice! Many thanks for these wonderful pictures and your awesome commentary.
God Bless Our TROOPS!!!
THANK YOU!!!
My pleasure ... ;)
Thank You for your service and post, SGT Hoffert, very well said.
Much thanks for the ping, Justa. We have by far the finest military in the world!
Ping to #16. :-)
We have by far the finest military in the world!
A GIGANTIC BUMP AND AMEN FOR THAT POST!
Thank you for posting this. Prayers for our troops and the people who have suffered under this brutality.
The Kurds (and most other Iraqis, but the media won't tell you that) idolize their liberators.
Now, those are some priorities that are straight.
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