Nazar Naqvi has faithfully voted Republican for more than three
decades.

After Donald Trump’s feud with Muslim parents who lost a son in
battle for the United States, he has vowed not a single Republican will get his
vote.

Naqvi, 69, a retired U.S. government engineer from Newburgh, New
York, is a member of a small community of Muslims who are among America’s Gold
Star families, those whose loved ones were killed while serving in the U.S.
military.

His son Mohsin Naqvi, who was born in Pakistan, enlisted in the
U.S. Army four days after Sept. 11, 2001, and was killed in 2008 by a roadside
bomb in Afghanistan.

Trump lashed out at Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the Pakistani
American parents of slain U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, after they appeared
at last week’s Democratic convention in Philadelphia to criticize the
Republican presidential hopeful for proposing a temporary ban on Muslims
entering the country.

“I’m going to vote for anyone but Republicans because of
this one person, this man who has gone out of his mind,” Naqvi said this
week. “Not any office should get our vote. He has been nominated not by
one person – the Republican Party nominated him.”

Naqvi said he was pressing his registered Republican friends to
do the same.

The Pentagon says that 3,939 active duty service members have
identified themselves as Muslim, less than 1 percent of the 1.3 million active
duty U.S. military troops, but a Pentagon spokesman said there is no record of
how many Muslims have been killed in action.

Reuters reached out to a dozen Muslim Gold Star families who
lost a loved one in action after Sept. 11, 2001.

The families are not organized as a group and some did not want
to talk. But those who did agreed that Trump’s comments upended their political
loyalties, and moved them to take action to register and motivate other voters
to keep Trump out of the White House in November.

Nooshin Razani, 43, an Iranian-American pediatrician in Oakland,
California, whose 19-year-old brother Omead Razani died while serving as a U.S.
Army medic in Iraq in 2004, said Trump’s comments sparked her to speak to the
press for the first time.

“When I saw there was this person who was willing to use
religion in this negative way, I decided I’m coming forward,” said Razani.

Trump rebuked Khizr Khan for suggesting that he should read the
U.S. Constitution and said his wife Ghazala may have stood silently by her
husband because she might not have been “allowed” to speak.

Although Trump did call their son a hero and said his aim was to
end radical Islamic terror, the ensuing uproar has caused many Republicans to
distance themselves from him and to support the Khan family.

Razani joined more than 20 Gold Star families in signing an open
letter calling for Trump to apologize to the Khans and said she is going to
volunteer to register voters, mainly because of Trump’s comments about Ghazala
Khan, which she said insulted all Muslim women.

“I want to be an active part of making sure people’s voices
are heard. Even people Trump thinks don’t speak up,” Razani said.

Trump’s ongoing dispute with the Khans has become a call to
political action for Kevin Ahearn of Phoenix. His brother, Army Major James
Ahearn, converted to Islam to marry a woman with whom he fell in love in Iraq,
brought to the United States and with whom he had a daughter before he was
killed by a bomb in Iraq in 2007.

Kevin Ahearn, 48, said on Tuesday that he and his husband
planned to go to Democratic Headquarters in Phoenix to volunteer for the first
time.

“It makes me all the more determined that he does not make
it to the White House,” said Ahearn, whose Muslim niece now is 10.

The soldier’s mother said she was shocked by Trump’s rhetoric
and wishes she could talk to her late son about it.

“He
was always a staunch Republican because they backed the military. I can’t
imagine how he would feel now,” said Constance Ahearn, 75, who lives in
the San Francisco area.