AUGUSTA — Ghazi Yousef and Khalid Zamat, who moved to Augusta last year from southern Maine, are from a small town near Nasiryah in southern Iraq, where they still have relatives. That’s far from the northern and western swaths of the country controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

That doesn’t mean the violence hasn’t touched them. Yousef and Zamat said their 19-year-old cousin, who was an Iraqi soldier, was killed by terrorists in Tikrit, the ISIL-held city perhaps best known for being Saddam Hussein’s birthplace.

Terrorists broke the news of the killing with a phone call to the young soldier’s parents, Yousef and Zamat said. Zamat hasn’t talked with the soldier’s father yet. He doesn’t know what to say. Now the Augusta residents’ days are spent tracking news and worrying when they get phone calls from home, the only way they can communicate with relatives there.

On his iPhone, Zamat streamed an online video of terrorists executing Iraqi border guards. They start the video alive, face-down in the sand. Some are whipped. Then the terrorists sit them up, asking them in Arabic whether they work for the government. They admit it. Then the group of terrorists shoots all of them at once.

“That’s what we’re scared of back home,” said Abdul, Zamat’s 17-year-old son, who helped translate for his father.

They bristled at the idea of ISIL getting its own state, saying it doesn’t live up to the Islamic part of its name. Yousef said “all the things they do is against Islam,” since they kill and steal.

Yousef and Zamat said they would welcome more American involvement in the country.

“We need the American support in Iraq,” Yousef said. “We don’t talk about (the Iraqi) government, but the public, they need help.”