By Sam Wohlforth ’13, Staff Writer

Finally, it is over.  After seven and a half bloody years, Operation Iraqi Freedom came to an official end last month when the final combat brigade crossed the Iraqi border into Kuwait. With popular support for the war dwindling, President Barack Obama has announced the end of combat operations in Iraq, although approximately 50,000 troops will remain in Iraq for training the fledgling Iraqi security forces. Only time will tell how the American people, including students at Newark Academy, will respond to America’s continued but limited involvement in Iraq.

To those too young to remember, in 2002 former President George W. Bush asserted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, despite widespread dispute in the intelligence community. Following America’s declaration of war on Iraq, troops took only twenty-five days to rout the poorly equipped Iraqi Army, and moved on to combat the remaining loyalists of Saddam Hussein’s regime and terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.  Violence erupted in Iraq with religious tension between the two main Iraqi Muslim religious sects, the Shi’as and the Sunnis, as well, leaving an estimated 100,000 Iraqis and more than 4,400 Americans dead.

One of the central issues of the presidential campaign of 2008 was the removal of American troops from Iraq. With the withdrawal of combat troops, Obama is honoring his campaign pledge, albeit later than his critics wanted. 2011 is the tentative deadline for the final withdrawal of troops, but this may be extended if the situation deteriorates. However, troops in Iraq still feel the fire of the insurgencies, even after they perform fewer and fewer frontline duties.

Even as America’s engagement in the Middle East appears to be tapering off, Newark Academy’s Support the Troops club is still actively working to support our soldiers overseas. Club president, Senior Joe Gerish, said that the end of the combat mission Iraq will certainly affect how the club works to help soldiers, as “one of the big things the club does is collecting magazines, body armor or donations. ” While these will continue with America’s involvement overseas, Gerish said that future fundraising may shift to help soldiers at home, as “when the troops come back, a lot of them deal with post traumatic stress disorder. Whether they are in Iraq or back home we try our best to help them either way.”  In fact, Gerish predicts that club activity may actually increase with the multitude of local opportunities for club members to get involved in aiding returned combat troops from Iraq.