Georges Sada - Background and Career

Background and Career

Georges Sada was born in 1939 in Iraq into a Christian family of Assyrian ethnicity (see his account). As a boy, Sada attended the Assyrian Church of the East with his family, later becoming a 'born-again' Christian and attending a more evangelical church. Throughout his childhood, Sada had a keen interest in military aircraft and the Air Force, playing as a boy at the RAF Base where his father was stationed, and imagining himself flying the fighters he saw taking off. In this time he did 'odd jobs' at the base, befriending both the pilots and the technicians who repaired their aircraft, resolving that one day he himself would have a career in the Air Force as a pilot. In 1958 at the age of nineteen, Sada applied to the air academy in Iraq and was accepted as a cadet, graduating from the Iraqi Air Academy in 1959. Over the following years he served as an Air Force Officer, including periods studying overseas in Britain, the USSR and the United States. Between 1964–1965 he was a student at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. Sada's career in the air force spanned 28 years, from 1958 to 1986. He officially retired in 1986 as a two-star officer, but was later called back to active service as an Air Vice Marshall for the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. During the conflict Sada defied the orders of Saddam Hussein by refusing to execute POWs, attributing this disobedience to his strong Christian convictions. In interviews, Sada has described his attempts to persuade Saddam not to harm the prisoners (an action which would have violated the Geneva Convention and would have been a war crime): Saddam eventually relented and spared the POWs, although Sada himself was subsequently imprisoned for a time. In his book Saddam's Secrets, Sada states that Saddam did not want him harmed after his release, but wanted no further contact with him thereafter.