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Thursday, June 7, 2012

Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, an American Muslim martyr honoured by General Powell, Islamic World News,

Islamic World News
Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, an American Muslim martyr honoured by General Powell

“He was an American soldier first,” said his father, Feroze Khan. “But he also looked at fighting in this war as fighting for his faith. He was fighting radicalism.”

Khan was killed by an improvised explosive device in August 2007 along with four other soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter while searching a house in Baqouba, Iraq. He’s one of four Muslims who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and are buried in Arlington National Cemetery, where 512 troops from those wars now rest.

About 3,700 of the U.S. military’s 1.4 million troops are Muslims, according to Defence Department estimates.

Khan, a child of immigrant parents from Trinidad, was 14 when the Sept. 11 attacks happened. Feroze Khan said he remembered his son watching in stunned silence: “I could tell that inside a lot of things were going through his head.”

Three years later, Feroze honoured his son’s request and allowed him to enlist him in the Army. “I told him: ‘You are going to the Army.’ I never said there is a war going on in a Muslim country. I didn’t want him to get any ideas that he was fighting (against) his religion.” Feroze kept his fears for his son’s safety to himself.

His son was assigned to the Stryker Brigade Combat Team out of Fort Lewis, Wash., deployed to Iraq in 2006 and fought on Baghdad’s Haifa Street, a Sunni insurgent stronghold.

His tour was extended as part of the surge of additional U.S. forces to Iraq , and he called or messaged home often until he was deployed to restive Diyala province, where he was under fire too often to contact home regularly.

http://newageislam.com/kareem-rashad-sultan-khan,-an-american-muslim-martyr-honoured-by-general-powell--/islamic-world-news/d/913


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