Abdullah Saad, 45, has worked at Salah al-Din Furnace and Sweets for 11 years. In that time, he watched the store grow by increasing its storefront, investing in evolving its cake designs, and hiring new workers.
Abdullah has seen novice young men come to the bakery, sometimes desperate, looking for work. Over time, they grow into trained bakers, decorators, and shop workers. He’s watched the people of Tikrit raise their children as they visit the store year after year for special events. He has seen couples get married, and then later come into the store looking to celebrate anniversaries, a new pregnancy, or the birth of a child. “I see people on the best days of their lives,” he said, beaming.
But beyond enjoying his work, the stability that Abdullah’s work affords his family has played an outsized role in their ability to recover from being internally displaced.
For the six of them, everything changed starting June 10, 2014, when ISIL invaded Tikrit. Like most businesses at that time, the bakery closed. For their safety, Abdullah was forced to flee to Kirkuk with his wife and four children. The couple was particularly concerned for their two young sons, who they feared ISIL would kidnap and force to fight.
For a year, they were in a state of transience, sometimes living out of their car, and for a few months, squeezed into another family’s extra storage room that was offered to them as charity.
Later, after the city was liberated, Abdullah returned to Tikrit to find his home ransacked.
“It was like starting all over again,” he said. Luckily, the bakery had reopened and Abdullah was able to return to his position behind the counter of Salah al-Din Furnace and Sweets.
In 2019, the business received a $27,500 grant from the Enterprise Development Fund that allowed them to further expand their gallery space and add a new line of cakes. The 17 workers they had before the grant grew by another seven.
Once again, customers were keeping the shop workers busy while the head chefs slathered cakes with colorful icing in the kitchen upstairs. Young workers learned the trade and hauled ingredients to the kitchen where the flour and sugar floated in the air.
As one of the most tenured employees at the bakery, Abdullah trains the new workers, who are traditionally from poor, low-earning families. He works closely with the shop’s owner, Ahmed Yosef Talib.
“I don’t only want the benefit for myself,” Ahmed said of his business’s continual growth. “I want to see all my employees and their families grow and prosper.”
