Dr. Muthanna Hammoshi is an orthopedic surgeon and a professor at the medical college in Mosul, Iraq. He grew up in what he says was the “golden age” of Mosul in the 1980s, but since then, the city has seen its golden image lose all its luster.

Once the second-largest city in Iraq, Mosul was destroyed after ISIS took control – and then lost it in the bloody battle of Mosul. 

That’s a defining point in the modern history of the ancient city, which was once known as Nineveh. 

Hammoshi was in Erbil in the Kurdistan region of Iraq this past week to work on a patient who had been shot in the leg by an ISIS sniper, and the wound had been infected. He worked with two American doctors – Paul Frewin and Kip Parsons – to try to save the leg. (The trip was arranged by Tim Hayes, a Springfield, Missouri, attorney and U.S. Army veteran who volunteers with the Free Burma Rangers, a non-governmental organization that helps people caught in warzones.) When I asked Hammoshi about how long the surgery might take, he said it should be fairly quick. 

“We can do it very rapidly,” he said of himself and the doctors in Mosul during ISIS’ assaults, “because we became war surgeons.” 

Hammoshi had to make a choice, serve ISIS or flee Mosul, and he left Mosul to wait out ISIS’ reign of terror. That was a difficult choice. Hammoshi grew up in Mosul, studied medicine there, and has practiced there for years. Since the fighting ended last year, he returned to practice there, trying “to heal some of the wounds of my people.” He hopes to see the city make a comeback, but his hopes are tempered by the reality that most of the city is still in ruins.

“Now,” he said, “all I have are memories.”