Features
Two weeks before Baghdad fell to U.S. Forces on April 9, 2003, Sari Khalil (COL ‘10) heard the American troops arriving. His house was on the western side of the city, smack in the middle of three Iraqi National Guard camps. One of them, Um-Almaank—just four miles from his house—contained not only a camp but also a mosque.
“We could hear the sound of the bombs coming closer, until it was our turn,” Khalil said. “[Um-Almaank] was so heavily bombed [the first] night, that we all knew we were going to die that day. You would hear the aircrafts coming real close; they were so close and so low that you could hear the sound of the missile leaving the plane … and then you would see this quick flash … and within half a second you would hear this huge sound … the whole house was like, broken windows. It was really scary.”
Khalil, his three younger brothers and his parents did survive that night, the “lightest night of the seven nights,” and escaped to spend the last two weeks almost 20 miles away at his grandfather’s house before the Iraqi troops surrendered.
By
Kate Mays
November 1, 2007
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