ISIS THE MOST DEADLY DISEASE EVER

Many of the world’s deadliest diseases can be prevented. Knowing what they are may be just the incentive you need to take preventive measures. COULD ISIS HAVE BEEN PREVENTED?

   We had just finished up our shoot in Al-Makasib Girls' Elementary School in Baghdad's Saadoun neighbourhood and were loading the gear into the car when a man sitting in a wheelchair across the courtyard beckoned to me.

"Come, talk to me, too," he said.

He introduced himself as Louay Hikmat Shawkat, Iraqi Army veteran of the war with Iran and then the 1991 Kuwait war, refugee from Mosul and a self-described translator of English, French, "Canadian" and "Yugoslavian."

Given that the latter two aren't languages, and his English was a tad scratchy, I was intrigued.

We were visiting the school to talk to its current "residents" -- 48 Christian families who had fled Mosul when ISIS took over a year ago. Mosul, in northern Iraq and one of the nation's largest cities, is about 405 kilometers (about 250 miles) from the capital of Baghdad. But for these internal refugees, it might as well be a world away.

I asked Louay, who is 60, when he thought he might be able to return home.Baghdad (CNN)

ISIS 'is an illness ... impossible to cure'

"Take it out of you mind that ISIS is going to leave Mosul," he insisted, gesturing with his hand as if he were pulling a thread out of his head.

The chances he and his wife will someday return to their home in the Mosul suburb of Hamdaniya, he said, are "one in a hundred. One in a million!"

Louay said he suffers from diabetes, but he insists on lighting up another cigarette in his nicotine-stained fingers "because I get upset whenever I speak about "Da'ish", the Arabic acronym for ISIS.

ISIS, he said, "is an illness. It's impossible to cure. Cancer can be cured, tuberculosis can be cured. Almost every illness can be cured, but not this one."

His diabetes causes him to suffer from dizziness whenever he stands up. "If I were well," he vows, "I would go fight them myself."

Like everyone else I spoke with at the school, he is desperate to leave Iraq, but his attempts to apply for asylum have come to naught. His last hope, he told me with a mischievous grin, is an old Canadian girlfriend in Montreal.