Americans killed by suicide bomber in Syria were no strangers to war

The four Americans who were killed by a suicide bomber in Syria on Wednesday were no strangers to America’s war zones overseas.

One was a top military linguist who worked closely with the National Security Agency and was on her eighth deployment. One was a hard-pounding rebounder on his high school basketball team who joined the Army Special Forces and served a half-dozen times in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. And one was a former Navy SEAL who later supervised the collection of intelligence for a Pentagon agency.

A fourth American killed was an Arabic interpreter who spent much of her childhood living in Syria and worked for a private defense contractor.

On Friday, some relatives of the victims made the sorrowing trek to Dover, Delaware, to recover the remains of their loved ones.

■ Shannon M. Kent, 35, had a position that in the bureaucratic lingo of the military might sound like a ho-hum desk job: Navy chief cryptologic technician (interpretive).

In reality, Kent had been deployed eight times into hard-fought war zones like Syria, serving in places where bombings and snipers were a common risk. She worked closely with the nation’s most secretive intelligence agency interpreting and assessing foreign communications and other intercepts.

■ Jonathan R. Farmer, 37, enrolled in a private college preparatory school after moving to Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, during his junior year of high school. He was an immediate presence on the basketball court.

Farmer’s father, Duncan, told The Palm Beach Post in a brief video interview that he could not count how many times his son had traveled overseas with his unit, the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Special Forces Group, which was based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

■ Scott A. Wirtz, 42, grew up in Missouri. When he joined the military, he sought out one of its most selective and difficult programs, graduating from the Navy’s Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training in 1998 and serving with the SEALs until 2005.

He deployed three times to the Middle East as a civilian with the Defense Intelligence Agency. For the past two years, he had supervised the collection of intelligence in the same sort of restive regions to which he deployed as a Navy SEAL.

■ Ghadir Taher, 27, was an Arabic interpreter from East Point, Georgia, who was working in Syria for Valiant Integrated Services, a defense contractor. Taher was born in Syria and became a naturalized American citizen after immigrating in 2001, her younger brother Ali Taher said in a phone interview.