An Ohio man volunteering alongside Kurdish troops in Iraq was seriously injured when he was hit by mortar fire in a battle against ISIS militants, he told NBC News on Wednesday. Ryan Gueli said he was thrown several yards in the air and was bleeding profusely after an ISIS mortar landed near him, he said in a Facebook interview from an Iraqi military hospital. Gueli said he was able to escape behind a defensive earthen wall, where he applied a tourniquet to his wounded right thigh, and a Kurdish soldier helped him walk to a vehicle. "If that soldier, who was as scared as I was, didn't come for me, I'd be dead," he said. Gueli is one of an estimated 100 American volunteers fighting alongside Kurdish troops in northern Iraq.
