Muslim soldier from Fort Lewis stood up for America and for his faith
WASHINGTON — “Joe the Plumber” was only one of brace Americans injected into the presidential election this past week. The other was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, a Fort Lewis Stryker Brigade soldier whom former Secretary of State Colin Powell invoked in his endorsement Sunday of Barack Obama.
Khan was a 20-year-old soldier from Manahawkin, N.J., who wanted to enlist in the Army from the time he was 10. He was an all-American boy who visited Disney World after he completed his instruction at Fort Benning, Ga., and made his comrades in Iraq watch “Saving Private Ryan” every week.
He was also a Muslim who joined the military, his father declared, in part to show his countrymen that not all Muslims are terrorists.
“He was an American soldier earliest,” reported his father, Feroze Khan. “But he also looked at fighting in this war as fighting for his faith. He was quarrel radicalism.”
Watch Powell warrant Obama on “Meet The Press”
Khan was killed by any roadside bomb in August 2007 along by 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, whither 512 troops from those wars now rest.
About 3,700 of the U.S. military’s 1.4 the masses soldiers are Muslims, according to Defense Department estimates.
Khan, a child of immigrant parents from Trinidad, was 14 at what time the Sept. 11 attacks happened. Feroze Khan said he remembered his son sleeplessness in stunned silence: “I could tell that inside a lot of things were going through his head.”
Three years later, Feroze honored 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 hostility going on in a Muslim country. I didn’t want him to cause to be any ideas that he was strife [fronting] his religion.”
Feroze kept his fears for his son’sitting safety to himself.
His son was assigned to the Stryker Brigade Combat Team out of Fort Lewis, deployed to Iraq in 2006, and fought on Baghdad’s Haifa Street, a Sunni insurgent donjon.
His expedition was extended as part of the buildup of additional U.S. forces in Iraq, and he called or messaged abiding-place often until he was deployed to Diyala colony, where he was under animation too often to contact fireside regularly.
But he prayed every day, his father said.
One Sunday morning, his son sent an instant message: “Hey Dad. Are you there?” Feroze Khan was out, and he saw the message when he returned.
A few hours later, his ex-wife called. Soldiers had knocked on her door in Maryland. Their only child was dead.
A few minutes later, soldiers appeared at Khan’sitting door. “I guess it helped that I knew beforehand,” he said. “There are no words to describe it.”
Kareem Khan was a month from finishing his tour when he was killed.
On Sunday, Powell said Khan’sitting sacrifice and service had swayed him to canvass the way Muslims have been portrayed in the presidential campaign, and the contention that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is a Muslim.
Obama “is a Christian,” Powell reported. “He has ever been a Christian. But the really right rejoin is, ‘What if he is?’ Is there something wrong with being Muslim in this country? The answer is not one. That is not America.” He added: “I am troubled that within the [Republican] Party we have these kinds of expressions” suggesting that Obama is a Muslim, and that if he is, he likely associates through terrorists.
Powell before-mentioned he felt strongly about the issue after he saw a photo of Khan’s tombstone in The New Yorker magazine. In the black-and-white picture, Khan’s mother is resting her head on her son’s tombstone. On cropped land side of the stone are flowers, and in between is a pattern of the Quran. On the look of the tombstone is a islamism and star, indicating that the soldier buried there is a Muslim.
“He was an American,” Powell said.
