REST IN PEACE, SERGEANT TAHA

UMass student dies in Iraq - Ph.D. candidate was in Army (Tom Marshall, Daily Hampshire Gazette, 1/5/05) (Registration required)

A promising doctoral student from the University of Massachusetts was killed Friday while serving with the U.S. Army Special Forces in Iraq.

Staff Sgt. Ayman A. Taha, 31, died in the city of Balad when a munitions cache exploded while he was preparing it for demolition, the Pentagon said.. . .

His parents, Abdel-Rahman and Amal Taha of Vienna, Va., said nothing of that accident in a Tuesday interview with The Washington Post, describing their son as a patriot and a devout Muslim who abruptly decided to join the Army in the summer of 2002.

'He believed that what he was doing were the good deeds Islam is asking for,' Taha's father said.

In addition to his parents, Taha leaves his wife, Geraldine, and a young daughter, Sommer, of Clarksville, Tenn.; and two sisters, Rabah and Lubna, of northern Virginia. . .

His father told The Washington Post that his son had approached him 'out of the blue' and said he was joining the Special Forces.

'Dad, I have been going to school since I was 5 years old,' Mr. Taha recalled his son saying. 'I want to take a break.'

But he said Ayman also strongly supported the military mission in Iraq, describing it as an effort to help the people of the Middle East to get out of a 'historic bottleneck' of tyranny.

Sudan Native Killed in Iraq Did 'Good Deeds' (Martin Weil, Washington Post, 1/4/05)

Ayman Taha, a Berkeley graduate who was described as athletic, a speaker of many languages, and a friend to all who met him, had only to write his dissertation to earn his PhD, his father said. . . .

It is "a very terrible thing," Abdel-Rahman Taha said. "He was a son, and a very special son."

The father added: "If you believe in God and you realize that this is God's will . . . it makes it a lot easier."

There is also consolation, the father said, in feeling that "this is something Ayman wanted to do."

"O soul that are at rest ! Return to thy Lord well pleased, well pleasing. So enter among My servants and enter My Garden."

Posted by David Cohen at January 5, 2006 4:20 PM