“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.”
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