The Republican’s typical political ploys may finally have come back to haunt him as the country reflects on a young man buried in Arlington cemetery

Fresh flowers appeared this week at the simple marble headstone of Humayun Khan, an American Muslim killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2004. His grave lies in Arlington national cemetery, where silent rows of headstones on rolling hills mark the final resting place for more than 400,000 service members, veterans and their families stretching back to the civil war.



“These are hallowed grounds,” a sign reads at the entrance, and a daily flow of mourners and map-wielding tourists stand in quiet respect at the tomb of the unknown soldier, the eternal flame at John F Kennedy’s grave, and the burial site of Audie Murphy, the most decorated US serviceman of the second world war.

“It’s very moving,” said Rich Galen, who served in Iraq as a Pentagon employee in 2003 and 2004 and whose father-in-law is buried at the cemetery. “There’s just headstone after headstone and, whether it’s a general or private, admiral or sailor, it’s the same.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Humayun Khan. Photograph: KHIZR KHAN

This sombre, serene oasis overlooking the Potomac river might also prove the graveyard of Donald Trump’s ambitions for the US presidency. The tributes to Khan, an army captain, reflect how in the eyes of many Americans, this was the week when the bombastic tycoon finally went too far. He has got away with insulting women, Mexicans, Muslims and fellow Republicans and once bragged: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” But when he took on the grieving parents of a war hero, he crossed a line.

It began at last month’s Democratic convention when Khan’s father, Khizr, excoriated Trump and asked, “Have you even read the United States constitution?” while brandishing a copy above his head.

Trump, as is his wont, blasted back. He insisted that Khizr had “no right” to criticise him, claimed that he too has made “a lot of sacrifices”, and wondered aloud why Ghazala Khan had stood silent beside her husband. “She had nothing to say,” Trump told ABC News. “Maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say.”

But the political ploys that have served him so well appeared to backfire this time. The Khans toured TV studios, explaining that grief had overwhelmed Ghazala when she saw a photo of her son – and then the couple calmly upbraided the Republican nominee’s character. Barack Obama dismissed him as “unfit” for the presidency. Numerous military veterans and members of his own party turned against him. Some polls showed his rival, Hillary Clinton, with a double digit lead. There was a sense of the wheels coming off: a Trump train wreck.

His nemesis was a man he never met and never will. Today there is only the headstone, inscribed with an Islamic star and crescent, standing among dozens of Christian crosses of other veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan in the cemetery’s section 60, the plot called “the saddest acre in America”. Who was Humayun Khan?

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His parents met at Punjab University in Lahore, Pakistan, then moved to Dubai, and he was born in the United Arab Emirates on 9 September 1976. When Khan was two, they followed so many other hopeful immigrants to the US – “if it was up to Donald Trump, he never would have been in America,” Khan said in July. The family started in Houston, Texas, then settled in Silver Spring, Maryland, where Khizr worked at a mortgage company and law firms.

“It was literally the same story with the rest of the immigrants who came empty-handed,” Khizr, a 66-year-old lawyer, told MSNBC. “We rented a $200 apartment, one bedroom apartment, with the family and started the life. But we were looking forward to the goodness of the country and the values.”

The Khans have fond memories of their naturalisation ceremony, in which they swore an oath of allegiance and pledged to uphold the US constitution. “I just have such a soft place in my heart whenever I see United States flag,” Khizr added, choking with emotion. “It means so much to me. And I can tell you the reason ... whenever I see these ceremonies and the expressions of the people’s faces, it reminds me when we first came to this country with hope and with belief that we will make it and it will get better.

“And with that hope in the ceremony, I was just beside myself [with] what is about to happen: I’m going to get the rights that no other country grants to its immigrants except this good nation.”

The couple retains the idealism about their country that jaded local residents often lack. In a 2005 interview with the Washington Post, Khizr recalled that he used to take his three sons to the Thomas Jefferson memorial and make them read the inspiring words inscribed there. Humayun, the middle child, loved reading about Jefferson, and later quoted him in an essay that helped secure his place at the University of Virginia.

Before that, he graduated from the John F Kennedy High School in Silver Spring. “Humayun was always dependable,” Ghazala wrote in an op-ed this week. “If I was vacuuming the house and he was home, he would take the vacuum from my hand and clean the house. He volunteered to teach disabled children in the hospital how to swim. He said, ‘I love when they have a little bit of progress and their faces, they light up. At least they are that much happy.’ He wanted to be a lawyer, like his father, to help people.”

At university, he majored in psychology and planned to attend law school. But he also joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) and, after graduating in 2000, told Khizr that enlisting in the army felt like the natural next step.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The gravesite of Humayun Khan in Arlington, Virginia. Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Despite their reservations, the couple were gratified by the sight of their son in an American uniform. “After we pinned him his lieutenant bars after commissioning,” Khizr said, “we got the first salute from him and it meant the world to us, looking at our young son in the uniform of this beautiful, beautiful place where we have made home. And the pride in his eyes and happiness and joy on his face was just amazing.”

But in 2003, George W Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq over what proved to be nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Many tens of thousands of people have since been killed, including more than 4,000 US soldiers. The reverberations, including the rise of the so-called Islamic State extremist group, still haunt the US and the world.

Khan last spoke to his parents on Mother’s Day, 2004. Ghazala told her son, “I don’t want you to be a hero. I want you to return back to me safely,” according to the New York Times. Khan replied: “Of course I will. But mother, you should know I have responsibility for these soldiers, and I cannot leave them unprotected.”

Khan helped Iraqi civilians find work for $5 an hour patrolling the streets of Baquba base, north-east of Baghdad. He belonged to a logistics unit, the 201st Forward Support Battalion, which guarded the gates of a base known as Camp Warhorse. The mood was tense. Several innocent Iraqis, driving to work at the base, had just been killed or injured at the gates for failing to heed warning signs and guards.

On the morning of 8 June 2004, the gate guards alerted Humayun to an orange-and-white taxi moving slowly moving towards the base. He yelled for everyone to hit the ground, then walked 10 steps towards the taxi with his arm outstretched, gesturing to halt. The driver detonated his explosives before the car could ram the gates or nearby mess hall, where more than a hundred soldiers were at breakfast. Khan and two Iraqis were killed.

As of last December, he was one of 14 American Muslims who have died serving the US since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001. Khan, 27, was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze Star and buried at Arlington, in a service under a hot midday sun that included the Nimaz-e-Janaza, an Islamic funeral prayer. His girlfriend, Irene Auer, from Germany, told the Post that day: “Whenever I was upset, he always found the right words. He always calmed me down. He was perfect. He was the most wonderful person I’ve ever met.”

Decorum, politics and respect for the dead that transcends culture have long put killed soldiers and their families beyond reproach. Clinton, who has been bitterly condemned by a woman whose son died in the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, has been painstakingly sympathetic. Trump charged forward like a bull in a china shop, crashing and smashing his way through every taboo. On Tuesday, after days of criticising the Khans, he boasted how a veteran had given him a Purple Heart, which he had “always wanted”.

Senator John McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam who was the Republicans’ 2008 nominee, was unsparing. “While our party has bestowed upon him the nomination,” he said this week, “it is not accompanied by unfettered licence to defame those who are the best among us.”

A group of veterans gathered on Capitol Hill to petition McCain and other Republican leaders to withdraw their endorsements of Trump. They included Mickiela Montoya, who served in Iraq in 2004. “Donald Trump has attacked every single one of my identities,” she said, describing herself as a woman, veteran, Latina and mother. “Trump is trying to change the definition of what it means to be an American.”

The last non-politician to win the presidency was Gen Dwight Eisenhower, who took the unconditional surrender of the Nazis. Trump is a former reality TV show host who received five deferments from the Vietnam war draft: four for university and one for health (“heel spurs”). Trump also once said that avoiding venereal diseases had been his “personal Vietnam”.

Galen, 69, a veteran of the national guard who went on to be press secretary to vice-president Dan Quayle, will not be voting for his party’s nominee. “We treat fallen servicemen with a great deal of respect and their families with a great deal of compassion,” he said. “It’s a political and social faux pas to do anything to disagree with that. What Trump did was violate this compassion rule.”

“Trump had such tin ear,” Galen added. “All he had to do was say, ‘I’m very sorry for the loss of your son,’ and that would have ended it. Instead it’s gone on for a week.”

Indeed, history might judge Khizr Khan’s seven-minute speech in Philadelphia as the turning point in this year’s presidential election: the moment that Trump was finally unmasked. “Have you ever been to Arlington cemetery?” Khizr asked, a question that remains unanswered.

“Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America. You will see all faiths, genders and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”