Iraq war sparks NIC student's journey to higher calling
Courtesy photo Ayad Saleh, a North Idaho College student preparing for his GED, talks about his experiences in Iraq after his city, Mosul, was taken over by ISIS in 2014.
Saleh, who worked with an American relief organization during his country’s war with ISIS, poses in Iraq with two Iraqi police trainees. (Courtesy photo)
Ayad and Brittany Saleh stop for a photo while visiting a refugee camp in Iraq. The couple were not yet married, and Brittany, a nurse from Coeur d’Alene who works at Kootenai Health, was on a mission helping in the intensive care unit of an emergency field hospital outside Mosul. (Courtesy photo)
A wounded patient is brought into the emergency field hospital in Iraq where Ayad Saleh worked in security. (Courtesy of Samaritan’s Purse)
With ISIS insurgents moving closer and closer to their home in Mosul, Ayad Saleh and his family left their house and joined thousands of their neighbors heading for safety outside the city.
It was 2014, and the Iraqi Army was about to be defeated at Mosul by the terrorist organization. The city was about to fall to ISIS.
“I was walking and walking and walking, and I looked behind me, and I saw the people, and I saw the city, and the bullets and the explosions,” said Saleh, now 23 and a Coeur d’Alene resident studying at North Idaho College to earn his GED. “I was very, very, sad. I was grieving at that moment, and I was really deeply wounded for what happened to the people, and for what happened to our military.”
What he saw that night was also a call to action for Saleh, prompting him to pray.
“I said, ‘God, please just be with those people, and I’m sure there’s going to be a war, so please send me to those people to help them with whatever I can,” Saleh said. “…I want to be part of the liberation that’s going to happen in this area.”
After escaping Mosul and resettling in Erbil, a city about 50 miles east, in Iraq’s Kurdistan province, Saleh found that because of the war with ISIS, he was unable to complete high school and earn his diploma.
“I tried to go to school, but it was not very good,” Saleh said. “There were no teachers and no materials, so I quit school and went to work with Samaritan’s Purse.”
An evangelical Christian relief organization, Samaritan’s Purse helps meet the needs of people around the world who are victims of war, famine, natural disasters and disease.
“They’re there to show these people care and kindness and love, delivering Christianity to people to show them, ‘We love you,’” Saleh said.
He worked for two years with Samaritan’s Purse as a chaplain, and in 2016, as part of a team that went into the country’s villages as they were taken back from ISIS.
The liberation was happening, and Saleh was there, helping his people.
Not long after, Samaritan’s Purse built an emergency field hospital 11 miles outside Mosul. Operated by the charitable organization for nine months, the hospital provided life-saving care to more than 4,000 of the city’s war victims.
Saleh took a job in security at the hospital.
“When they offered that job to me, it was like my dream came true…It was just the perfect, fulfilling job for me,” Saleh said.
It was nine months of his life that he said he will never forget. What Saleh saw affected him deeply.
“It taught me so much. I saw everything. I saw people die, children die, people get burned, people with no hope, people who are scared,” he said. “They’re just looking for safety, for help, for someone to say any kind word to them.”
It was not easy being in that environment, he said, but it’s where he found his calling.
“I found I want to do this. I want to help people. I want to protect people,” Saleh said. “I felt like it was my purpose and what I’m meant to do for those people.”
That’s where he met the woman he would marry, Brittany, a nurse who lived in Coeur d’Alene and worked at Kootenai Health. She served in the field hospital’s intensive care unit, handling trauma. The couple became engaged and married earlier this year after Saleh moved to the U.S.
“She rescued a lot of people,” said Saleh.
When the ISIS terrorists’ occupation of Mosul ended in 2017, Samaritan’s Purse handed control of the field hospital over to the Iraqi Ministry of Health.
Saleh then went to work in the refugee camps in Iraq.
“Our job was ministering to people spiritually and mentally, to help them overcome what they’ve come through living under ISIS control and all the trauma they’ve gone through,” he said. “That was very meaningful to me.”
Today, Saleh is attending classes at NIC’s Adult Education Center, striving to earn his GED so he can work for the U.S. military.
“I loved my job as a translator, because I worked as a translator before, and this is my skill that I can use to benefit others,” Saleh said.
Laura Umthun, director of the Adult Education Center at NIC, said Saleh has faced obstacles and barriers in his life that most people in the U.S. will never experience.
“With earnest perseverance and discipline, Ayad is now studying to pass the difficult GED battery of tests,” Umthun said. “This will give him the opportunity to live out his future vision he had for himself, as he fled Mosul with this family, to help and protect people from all walks of life.”
Saleh hopes to have his general equivalency diploma by February.
He said his experience at NIC has been positive.
“I think what I like about this program is mainly the teachers …” Saleh said. “I’ve never been in a school where teachers respect students so much, and they do an even beyond excellent job helping the students. I’m just very satisfied … with everything here.”
Saleh recalled returning to Mosul for a visit, while working at the field hospital, and taking a walk along the city streets.
People recognized him as “the security guy who worked at the American hospital.” They remembered seeing him help receive patients and bring them into the hospital. They hugged him, and one man thanked him for helping save his son’s life.
“Then, I realized that God really responded to my prayer,” Saleh said. “And I did what I really wanted to do.”
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Maureen Dolan is a community relations coordinator at North Idaho College.