What Was Black Sunday? | The Long Road Home

2m read

·Nov 11, 2024

We got the intel brief we got about 30 days before we left. Said that you're going to the safest place in Iraq.

In April 2004, one year after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq was controlled by a US-led transitional government. This period marked a relative lull in violence in the war. The soldiers stationed at Camp War Eagle expected an uneventful deployment.

When we deployed, you know, we knew that there had been a lot of enemy activity in Sadr City up to that point. You know, I think it was general knowledge that there hadn't been a shot fired in over six months. The division was tasked with peacekeeping and supporting local rebuilding efforts in a part of Baghdad known as Sadr City.

Initially, what we thought we were going to do is go in there and provide security to contractors who are going to come in and repair the damaged sewage system, repair the damaged freshwater system, repair the electrical systems. All the things that had deteriorated since the first Gulf War, because of the bombing that we did there and because of neglect by Saddam Hussein's government before we finally toppled it.

That was the mission that we thought we were going to do. Sadr City was increasingly controlled by Muqtada Al-Sadr, an influential religious activist and vocal opponent of foreign occupation in Iraq. On March 28, US coalition forces ordered the closure of Al-Sadr's newspaper, which escalated the tensions that would lead to violence.

When the ambush started, we were actually headed back in. We had been out escorting the sewage trucks throughout the day. As we moved in and moved down that road, a couple of rounds fired. And we stopped to look from where it was. And that's when it just kept ramping up. And there was more and more and more.

Within a few minutes, we knew exactly what was going on. We were involved in a close ambush, and we needed to push through. And that's when the fighting got real heavy.

How much I pay in taxes on a $163,800 per month income

Mosaic plots and segmented bar charts | Exploring two-variable data | AP Statistics | Khan Academy

View All

Finding measures using rigid transformations

We are told that triangle ABC, which is right over here, is reflected across line L. So it’s reflected across the line L right over here to get to triangle A prime, B prime, C prime. Fair enough! So based on that, they’re going to ask us some questions, …

Adding integers: find the missing value | 7th grade | Khan Academy

We are asked to find the missing value, and they give us a hint: use the number line to find the missing value. Let’s see, they say 4 plus something is equal to negative 6. So why don’t you pause this video and see if you can work through this before we …

Creating modules | Intro to CS - Python | Khan Academy

We’ve been writing our code all in a single file, but as our programs get longer, our main logic tends to get buried underneath all of our function definitions, which can make the program hard to read. So, easy solution: what if we just took all those fun…

Third parties in the United States | US government and civics | Khan Academy

Let’s talk about “third parties” in the United States. I put the word “third” in quotation marks because there’s more than one third party; so you could even think of it as a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh parties. The reason why people say thi…

Action and reaction forces | Movement and forces | Middle school physics | Khan Academy

You’ve probably heard the phrase that for every force there’s an equal and opposite reaction force, and this is also known as Newton’s third law of motion. But it’s also one of the most misunderstood laws of physics. So that’s why we’re going to dig into …

Vector form of multivariable quadratic approximation

Okay, so we are finally ready to express the quadratic approximation of a multivariable function in vector form. So, I have the whole thing written out here where ( f ) is the function that we are trying to approximate. ( X_0 ) and ( Y_K ) is the constant…

What Was Black Sunday? | The Long Road Home

More Articles