[Cuchulain]

Thank you for your service Sgt. Hoffert. God Bless You And Protect You!

[Travis McGee]

God Bless Our Troops!!!

[Vigilantcitizen]

Godspeed to our troops.

[Darksheare]

Good luck and Godspeed Seargent.
Thanks for saying this as well.

[esoteric]

Thank you for your service and message. Prayers.

[Leo Farnsworth]

Awesome.

Thanksabunch!

[tflabo]

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.

[STARWISE]

THANK YOU .....THANK YOU !!! Goosebumps, God bless all our heroes .. PING!

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 Hussein’s genocidal war on the Kurds—and 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 family’s house, preparing food, when she saw the helicopter. The Iranians and the peshmerga had just attacked Iraqi military outposts around Halabja, forcing Saddam’s 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 o’clock, 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 physician’s 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 o’clock, 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 wasn’t so loud. It was like pieces of metal just dropping without exploding. We didn’t know why it was so quiet.”

A short distance away, in a neighborhood still called the Julakan, or Jewish quarter, even though Halabja’s 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!

[Just A Nobody]

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.

Thank you for your service and sacrifice! Many thanks for these wonderful pictures and your awesome commentary.

God Bless Our TROOPS!!!

[jazusamo]

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!

[azkathy]

Thank you for posting this. Prayers for our troops and the people who have suffered under this brutality.

[Allegra]

American (lefties) idolize celebutards.

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.

[LucyJo]

Whew! I’m in tears. Happy tears for obvious reasons, and angry tears because our news media doesn’t show stories like this, or, if they do show something positive, it’s only in passing and certainly not the 24/7 focus to inspire and instill pride and love of country like the negative news is given.

We can’t depend on many of our professional journalists to report positive stories from our homeland, much less positive stories about how others feel about our military people and America.

We appreciate you men and women in uniform so much, and you are always in our personal prayers. Our military folks are mentioned in prayer at all of our church services. And, this time of year when the rest of us are gathering safely at the homes of loved ones to celebrate Thanksgiving, we thank God for the service and sacrifice of you all, and that of your loved ones.

God bless and protect you all, and God bless all of us to be as loyal to the cause of freedom as are our military folks.

Thank you for sharing this story with us in this post.

[Bellflower]

A keeper. What a great story. I imagine that there are many more out there that are simply not getting out. Thank you and God bless you and our Military!