10 Years After the U.S. Went to War With ISIS, the Scars Remain in Iraq

“I knew my parents were ISIS targets.”

TIKRIT, IRAQ. Dr. Ali Wissam, 29, is the senior head and neck surgeon at Tikrit Teaching Hospital in central Iraq. In June of 2014 — what he calls “the most terrifying time of my life” — he lost contact with his family for a month. “At the time, I was studying medicine in Amman, Jordan, but I flew back to Erbil on the day I heard that ISIS was entering Tikrit. All the cell phone towers were down so that no one could talk to each other, and I had no idea what was happening to my family.”

“I knew my parents were ISIS targets as they were government-paid doctors. My mother was a gynecologist, and my father was the dean of medicine at Tikrit Hospital. We knew by then that ISIS was killing anyone associated with government entities, so I was distraught. I felt so helpless as I knew they would kill me if I went to try to find them.”

Hours of waiting turned into days, but after a long and terrible month of worry, Dr. Ali finally got a call from his father. “I wept when my father told me they were safe,” he says. “He said he and my mother had survived by moving at night — from one basement in a house to another before eventually escaping the city hidden in the back of a truck early one morning bound for Kirkuk. They were lucky, but many were not.”