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The events of 9/11 had a monumental impact on Ayman Taha. Like most of his fellow Americans, he was horrified. He felt the world change overnight.

As a Muslim born in Sudan, he felt it more acutely. Suddenly his religion had become a byword for terror and a hatred of the western world. But Ayman, who was raised and educated in the US and England, was determined to show his fellow Americans that Muslims were not their enemy.

Less than a year later, in August 2002, he abandoned his master’s degree and a planned career in international development to enlist in the US Army.

With his high level of education, his knowledge of Islamic culture and fluency in four languages — including Arabic — he was fast-tracked into the special forces and sent to Iraq. He rose quickly to the rank of staff sergeant engineer, married a fellow immigrant, Geraldine, from South Africa, and had a baby. Life was good.

On December 30, 2005, during his second tour of Iraq, Ayman Taha was leaving a house at Balad, preparing a munitions cache for demolition, when it exploded, killing him instantly. He was 31. His daughter Sommer was just eight months old.

I know Ayman’s story not because I read about it in the papers but because in January 2006 I boarded a plane from Nashville to Washington DC and found myself sitting in the back row next to a friendly young woman who asked me what I was doing in Nashville.

I told her I had been interviewing Dolly Parton. She was returning from the home of her sister-in-law, who had just become a widow, and her niece — a baby girl who would grow up without a father.

Now she was on her way to the funeral of her brother, who had been killed in action and was being buried with military honours at Arlington National Cemetery. This would follow an Islamic funeral service at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society Center in Sterling, Virginia. I was mesmerised and moved by the story I’d been told by the young woman, whose name was Rabah but whose friends and family called Rubi. I assumed her brother’s heroic death, and the unusual circumstances in which he had joined up — to demonstrate that the War on Terror was not a fight between the Christian world and the Muslim world — must have made headline news in America.

Not so, she said. America was not ready for a Muslim military hero. In fact, America was more interested in demonising Muslims as potential terrorists than acknowledging their sacrifice for their country. One exception was The Washington Post, which did run a brief story about Ayman, describing him as “athletic, a speaker of many languages, and a friend to all who met him”.

HIS father, Abdel-Rahman, who worked for the World Bank in Washington, told the paper he had found some consolation in knowing that his son died doing something he wanted to do. “If you believe in God and you realise that this is God’s will,” he added, “it makes it a lot easier.”

Ayman Taha was born in Sudan in 1974. When his father, a professor at Khartoum University, found a job with the World Bank and moved his young family to America in 1979, Ayman was sent to primary school in a suburb of Washington and later, when his father was posted abroad, to secondary school in England. He obtained a BSc in economics from the University of California and a master’s from the University of Massachusetts, where he was working towards a PhD. He needed only to complete his dissertation when he decided to join the army. “We were surprised but Ayman had always been interested in the military,” recalls Rubi.

“After 9/11 the level of Islamophobia and the lack of understanding of all Muslims was horrible. I think Ayman felt he could contribute to changing the depiction of Muslims and actually help with the situation out in Iraq.”

His father told the Washington Post that his son was “definitely patriotic” and “believed in the mission”, adding: “He strongly agreed that what they were doing is good and that they were helping people in the Middle East.”

Ayman was a devout Muslim, he explained, who felt that “the message of Islam is very simple — to believe in God and do good deeds.”

His wife Geraldine, whom he met in 2004, said of Ayman: “He was a very positive person and he took world affairs seriously. He believed he could change things and be a part of history. He put his life on the line for something he believed in. He is a hero.”

I waited more than a decade for the right time to tell his story. During a week when a man like Ayman — a Muslim, born in Sudan — could have been barred from entering the US because its new president believes America would be safer without him, I contacted Rubi via Facebook to ask if I could do so. She kindly agreed and we spoke at length on the phone; it was as if we were resuming the conversation we had begun more than a decade earlier. Rubi is a special needs teacher and now lives in New York, having spent time in London and Paris.

These are, she says, strange days for everyone. “In a way it’s worse this time,” she says. “The reaction after 9/11 was a sentiment but this is official. This is coming from the very top. It’s the US government making a statement, deporting people and declaring us illegal.

“As a black woman, a Muslim and an immigrant, I feel as if all three parts of my identity are under attack. But I feel it’s my responsibility to fight this. It took me years to acquire US citizenship and I’m proud of it.”

By coincidence, Rubi had to collect her New York ID documents the morning after Trump’s election triumph last November. “It was like a ghost town. People told me the city had the same feel as it had the morning after 9/11. People were numb with shock.

“I do feel attacked but I also feel encouraged because people are standing together against it. I went to the protest at JFK after the ‘Muslim ban’ was announced and saw all these mostly white people with signs welcoming refugees. The sense of solidarity is enormous. What’s encouraging is that I know I’m not alone. And I know my brother would have tried to do what he could from within the system.”