Jihadi Du Jour: Iraqi Valor -- "The Hands of God"

I drop in on Michael Yon once in a while, and it's always worth it.

Yon describes a truly courageous Iraqi villager who sacrificed his life for his friends and family.

Grab a Kleenex, and read some excerpts.

Michael Yon writes:

He (the perp -- FB) was dressed as a woman as he walked down the alley toward the mosque full of worshippers. It was Friday, just before Ashura, and the air was chilled.

The bomb strapped to his body was studded with ball-bearings so that he could kill more villagers as they gathered for prayer. The detonation would eviscerate and dismember those closest, shattering bones into fragments, but the ball-bearings would ensure lethality beyond the percussive edge of the blast wave, ripping through the flesh of people who might not have been knocked down by the explosion.

There were no soldiers in his path to stop him; no police to alert to the man in women’s clothes. There were only villagers. The man dressed as a woman was to be the agent of their deaths. He kept walking down the alley toward the mosque where more than one hundred people were praying, a mass murderer masquerading in a woman’s garb.

The prayerful people may not have known he was coming, but we hear the explosions every day. Every single day. Seven days per week. I remember the story told to me by Tennessee National Guardsman of another such man who had grabbed the hand of a nearby child as cover, then walked over to some policemen before detonating himself and the child. I remember the bomber who rammed a car full of explosives into vehicle full of American soldiers in Mosul. The Americans had been surrounded by Iraqi children, and the bomber could have waited a block or two then attack the Americans man-on-man, but instead he chose to blow up the Iraqi kids.

The closer a counterfeit comes to the genuine article, the more obvious the deceit. As the murderer dressed in women’s clothes walked purposefully toward his target, there was a village man ahead. But under the guise of a simple villager was a true Martyr, and he, too, had his target in sight. The Martyr had seen through the disguise, but he had no gun. No bomb. No rocket. No stone. No time.

The Martyr walked up to the murderer and lunged into a bear hug, on the spot where we were now standing.

The blast ripped the Martyr to pieces which fell along with pieces of the enemy. Ball-bearings shot through the alley and wounded two children, but the people in the mosque were saved. The man lay in pieces on the ground, his own children having seen how his last embrace saved the people of the village

This guy knew what was coming down, too bad there wasn't a protective American GI around to shoot the insurgent -- but our rules of engagement ties their hands. And Nancy Pelosi starts screaming about how our heartless GI's shot a fat old lady in a burka.

His children had to watch his hunks of flesh fly in the air, doesn't this get to ya?

Well, men like that kind of explain why members of our military re-enlist. There's hope for these people.

I hope this villager has a special place in Paradise.

Photo from Michael Yon.

Crossposted at RedState and HinzSight.

Please click to the article. I put in alot of it, but Michael Yon tells it so much better than I ever could.

Crossposted at RedState, and Jihadi Du Jour.