In a triumph of hope over despair, the long ordeal of the 46 nurses stranded in the violence-torn Iraq has finally ended. The nurses have been freed from the clutches of militants in the oil-rich Persian Gulf state, and are expected to return home July 5. This message brought a sigh of relief for entire nation as country’s daughters were boarding flight back to India.
“I can confirm to you that nurses were freed,” Syed Akbaruddin, spokesperson of India’s external affairs ministry, told reporters in Delhi July 4. All easy it seems to read , is actually the result of strategic plan & battlefield heroics shown by one man & his team, the martyr General Soleimani, who was the commander in chief of Iranian Revolutionary Guards at that time and was co-ordinating operations against ISIS millitants alongside Iraqi Shia militia Hashd Al Shabi.
The entire nation might had been mourning the death of its citizens at the hands of the ISIS millitants but few can understand what they must have gone through as acutely as Jose, a nurse rescued from Tikrit belonging to Kerala. She was, after all, one of the 46 Indian nurses rescued from territories held by the Islamic State after 23 days of captivity in 2014.
The extremists had abducted the nurses (45 Keralites and one Tamil) and the workers around the same time that year. While the nurses were taken hostage after an attack on a Tikrit hospital, the workers were abducted from a construction site in Mosul.