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Mission of risk ... and reward

by Brooke Wolford Staff Writer
| July 30, 2017 1:00 AM

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?Lindsey Westwood, of Coeur d’Alene, walks the streets of Mosul fashioning heavy armor and an AK-47.? Courtesy photo

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Courtesy photo ?A young Iraqi girl sits upon Victor Marx’s lap as she plays with a fidget spinner.?

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?Courtesy photo A 13-year-old Yazidi boy escorted by soldiers after he’s pulled from the rubble caused by a mortar blast.?

A Coeur d’Alene woman stepped out of an armored vehicle in what was left of Mosul. The smell of death smacked her in the face as she looked upon two slain ISIS fighters on the ground.

That woman, Lindsey Westwood, 26, returned to North Idaho last Thursday after spending two days of hiding in Iraq while ISIS targeted her boss. She had spent the previous two months living in the Middle East country distributing food, medicine and comfort to kids who had been traumatized by the ongoing conflict.

Westwood left for her second trip to Iraq with her employer, Victor Marx, an inspirational speaker and owner of the nonprofit All Things Possible Ministries, in late May. Their team worked in displacement camps near Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan, as well as in Mosul, distributing supplies to children in both liberated and ISIS-controlled areas.

“We have a history of her working with us and we had her especially trained in several areas of security. Driving, medical and security made her a very qualified individual,” Marx said of Westwood in an email to The Press.

Westwood, a 2009 graduate of Coeur d’Alene High School, began working for Marx after she graduated from Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego with a degree in business communications. She worked as an administrative and personal assistant to Marx and his family when the Kurdish government invited Marx to counsel women and children traumatized by ISIS.

Her first trip was somewhat of a warm-up; the team stayed in a safer area of Iraq for days rather than months, and Westwood shot only pictures. But this time, she handled a gun instead of a camera.

“There wasn’t one time that I was fearful, but we weren’t going to Mosul,” she said of the first visit. “I didn’t have a weapon because I didn’t need one.

“But this time, Victor — this is like his sixth time in Iraq, so ISIS knows who he is — and actually the last 48 hours we were there this time, we got a call from a friend of Victor’s who got a call from an intelligence agency in the U.S.,” Westwood said.

The man told Marx that ISIS had targeted him, and that he needed to move to a secure location and promptly leave the country. Marx and the team kept hidden for two days before catching a flight back to the states.

“It’s not safe going into Iraq. It’s a risk and you might die,” Westwood said. “Mortars were going off two houses down from us. It’s just a risk that you have to be willing to take; you have to realize when you go that you might not come back, but the reward of helping those people is so much greater.”

Westwood’s team had special clearance into areas of Mosul that most non-governmental organizations couldn’t access, either because of safety concerns or security risks.

“It’s amazing that us, Victor Marx and ATP ministries, can get in there and take these kids out and get them help,” Westwood said.

While Mosul looks more like the apocalypse than a city, people still occupy the crumbling buildings. Westwood experienced this first-hand while she slept on top of a building in a liberated part of Mosul, occupied by an organization targeted by ISIS.

“I was so scared; you see the airstrikes going on in the distance,” she said. “And then to know that ISIS was trying to find the house that we were in, like what are we doing here?

“We were in Mosul even after it was liberated and there was still fighting, still airstrikes, still mortars.”

Westwood and Marx spoke with a captured ISIS commander, his hands tied behind his back while he knelt on the floor. He gave them an understanding of the people behind the terror.

“He was very hard, didn’t think he’d ever done anything wrong in his life, that kind of thinking,” Westwood said.

In the midst of gunfire, tanks and detonating mortars, Westwood and the team delivered powdered milk, water and diapers to children trapped in an active war zone in Mosul. It wasn’t uncommon for the team to find kids under rubble. Sometimes they found the children’s dead parents.

“This little boy is an orphan,” Westwood said, pointing to a photo of a toddler held by Marx. “His mom and dad were fleeing – his mom was carrying him — and they were running away because ISIS was shooting. ISIS shot down his mom and dad; they fell on the baby and an Iraqi soldier went to go rescue him ... The soldier was shot ... so they named the baby after the soldier who was shot because they didn’t know the name of the baby.”

Many of the kids Westwood helped were captured and kept by ISIS for years. Young girls were often sold into sex slavery, and boys were trained to fight and kill for ISIS, carrying out beheadings even as 8-year-olds. Death and violence were part of their daily lives for years, making it difficult to just be kids who can laugh and play. All Things Possible’s mission was to help them get there again.

ATP partnered with a nonprofit called Barzani Charity Foundation to make “trauma kits” and distribute them to kids in internally displaced people camps. The team put together gender-specific backpacks that contained a lion stuffed animal for boys, and a lamb for girls. When squeezed, the animals played Arabic music and prayers designed to soothe fears generated by trauma. The packs also included a comic book based on Marx’s own story of childhood trauma, a first-aid kit and crayons.

“Favorite things were definitely the distributions in the camps and getting to see the kids when they take the little stuffed animal out of the backpack and we turn it on for them and they listen, and you can just see their little faces go from sadness to just smiling. It’s so precious,” Westwood said.

The distributions weren’t anything like the lunch line at school, however. Thousands of IDPs, some who’ve lived in the camps as long as three years, crowd to the tables, pushing and shoving their way through orderly lines of tents occupied by multiple families at a time.

“It’s very prison-like; the camps are surrounded by 8-foot fences with wire to keep people out and tents in very neat rows. During distributions, it’s so hard to — they just want it, and they want it bad, so they’re going to push other kids and sometimes kids get hurt during distributions, and adults, because they’re trying to get their food, they’re trying to get their lion and lamb,” Westwood said. “But that’s just all they know.”

Cindy Westwood, Westwood’s mother, had a hard time watching her daughter go on such a high-risk adventure.

“My grandma didn’t want me to go, my parents didn’t want me to go, but you can’t let fear keep you from living your life and doing what’s right,” Westwood said.

“I just had to trust the Lord that that was His will for her this season in her life,” Mrs. Westwood said.

While there, Westwood realized something many Americans don’t: The term “Muslim,’ does not equal “terrorist.” Iraqi soldiers protected Westwood’s team, a team of Christians, and fought against Islamic extremists even though they themselves are Muslims. Westwood fully understood that religion isn’t a barrier when saying goodbye to Hassan, their security detail and an Iraqi soldier.

According to Westwood:

“Victor asked Hassan, ‘If something were to happen where one of your daughters or your wife was taken — would you sell me out?’ Hassan said, ‘No,’ and Victor said, ‘Why?’ And Hassan said, ‘I can remarry, I’m young enough that I can have another child, but I can’t replace you as my brother.’”