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| Iraq |
| U.S. Volunteers Aid Kurdish Fighters in Iraq |
| 2016-02-23 |
| [Free Beacon] Following an ISIS chemical weapons attack involving the use of chlorine mortar shells Feb. 11 near Sinjar Mountain in Iraq, a dozen seriously wounded Kurdish soldiers were assessed and bundled off on ambulances to a field hospital that had been set up a few days earlier by American volunteers working shoulder to shoulder with the Peshmerga. The volunteer unit that works as an adjunct of the Peshmerga's 9th Brigade calls itself "Qalubna Makum," which translates from Arabic as "Our Hearts Are with You." This newly-formed seven person team of U.S. and European combat veterans has been operating in Iraq's Kurdish region since December, and is led by a former U.S. Army officer from Los Angeles whose name is being withheld for his safety. The Americans are among more than 150 volunteers serving in Iraq with the Peshmerga, according to U.S. government sources. The tents, diesel generators, hospital beds, and over-the-counter medications for the field hospitals arrived in three large shipping containers by way of Tom Kelly, 65, a retired North Carolina football coach who has made it his mission to send donated hospital equipment to more than a dozen nations in Africa and the former Soviet Union. Many items for the Kurdish troops were donated by Kurdish-American members of the Tennessee Kurdish Community Council in Nashville. Kelly met with Peshmerga Gen. Zaim Ali, the former U.S. Army officer who leads the team of Americans, and others in mid-January to arrange the distribution of supplies. Kelly first linked up with the top brass of the Peshmerga in Nov. 2014 during a campaign to reclaim several villages that had been captured by ISIS troops in their blitzkrieg advance across northern Iraq in June of that year. At a battle for Kharbaroot, 22 miles west of Kirkuk, Kelly accompanied Gen. Rasheed Muhsin, a surgeon, as he tried in vain to save the lives of wounded Peshmerga without adequate blood supplies or anti-hemorrhaging tools. He says he was moved by the courage and sacrifice of the Kurdish military and returned to the U.S. with an even greater sense of mission. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |