PORTLAND, Maine — Salim Aymen Salim was 10 years old in 2008 when he left Iraq as a refugee. He remembers his mother and father selling the family car and their valuables, and saying goodbye to close family members they left behind in Mosul.
Now nearly 19 and about to start his second year at Bowdoin College, Salim has watched as the Islamic extremists took the city two years ago and then, in recent weeks, as it was liberated by Iraqi forces. He said Tuesday with resignation that things are not likely to change quickly for his grandfather and uncle, still in Mosul, and others who remain in the devastated country.
Earlier this month, three years after Islamic State militants took much of Northern Iraq, Iraqi forces drove the extremists from the city after nearly nine months of fighting. Nearly 1 million people fled the city, staying with friends and family or sheltering in camps outside Mosul, Reuters reported.
The United Nations estimates rebuilding the city will cost more than $1 billion.
But much of the city’s most historic monuments were lost in the battle. On June 21, when Islamic extremists blew up the Grand al-Nuri Mosque of Mosul, with its famous 150-foot leaning minaret, Salim was saddened and frustrated that “people who claim to be Muslim” were responsible for destroying the 12th-century mosque.
“When I see things like that, it really depresses me,” he said.
After fleeing to Turkey in 2008, Salim, his parents, younger brother and aunt moved to Portland in 2010. His dad works at L.L. Bean and his mother at the Maine Access Immigrant Network and Opportunity Alliance. But while many people fled Mosul as the Islamic extremists gained momentum, Salim’s father’s family — his grandmother, aunts and uncles — stayed, and then found themselves unable to leave.
Earlier this year, his grandmother and uncle hid in a basement for about a month at one point, sustained only by water and a bag of flour, he said.
Amid a government shutdown, paychecks were months behind.
“A bag of rice cost $500,” he said. “People were obviously starving.”
Communication with family was difficult, because anyone spotted in the street with a cell phone could be executed at any time. Still, the family hid a cell phone and carefully called Salim’s parents every few weeks.
While he worried, and still does, watching his parents’ pain as they envisioned what might be happening to their family was even more difficult, he said.
As he finished his senior year at Deering High School in Portland and then his first year at Bowdoin, Salim said he read the news sporadically, trying to “not let it destroy me” while he pursues his life here.
But he feels a deep responsibility to the country where he was born.
As the only Iraqi student at Bowdoin, “I have to bring these issues to attention all by myself,” he said. “I’ve met a lot of educated idiots. Sometimes they’re really unaware of what’s around them.”
Salim hopes to pursue a double major in government and education.
He’s also committed to contributing to his own communities of Portland, where he sees many kids in “cultural crisis, dealing with different cultures at home and at school,” and Bowdoin, where he will serve as vice president of student affairs next year.
In 2015, Salim gave a TEDTalk at TEDxDirigo, “Taking Risks is Risky,” telling of arriving in a sixth-grade class in Portland and being called “immigrant,” “terrorist” and even “Osama bin Laden.”
Everywhere he goes, he said he encounters people unaware of those who look differently. On one trip to Macy’s with his mother to buy a watch, the sales clerk looked back and forth between the two, his brown mother wearing the traditional Muslim hijab, and her lighter-brown son, and struggled to understand. When Salim then spoke Arabic to his mother — he actually speaks five languages — he left the clerk thoroughly confused, he said with a slight smile.
Last year, when he observed an elementary school class at a midcoast-area school as part of his education class, the teacher asked Salim, “Do you speak Musim?”
“I said, ‘No, I speak Arabic,’” he said. “I didn’t want to make a scene, but I didn’t know what to do.
“I can’t really put my identity away,” he added. “People ask where I’m from and I say, ‘Iraq, but I live in Portland.’”
On Tuesday, Salim spoke to his uncle in Mosul by phone, and he told him things in the city are much better than they were a few weeks ago, “relatively speaking.”
“The city is liberated and there’s a lot of reconstruction to do,” he said. “They’re bringing more social order. Personally … I hate to say I don’t really see it finishing up or being worked on any time soon because the current government is really corrupt. They’re more interested in selling out and selling oiI. A lot of people haven’t gotten paid, the politicians are going to wander around and continue to collect money and profit off of people’s suffering and pain.”
Asked if he hopes to return to Mosul someday, Salim says, “I don’t really have anything to go back to. Unless it’s to help rebuild, which I don’t see happening in the near future. The Middle East is a mess right now. I wish that a change would happen.”
He hopes to convey to Americans that those in Mosul need help.
“A lot of people are still suffering in the heat, with their children,” he said. “They’re seeking help. We need to talk about it — we need to be heard.”