Lassi (laban in Arabic) has become the speciality of a small boutique hotel in Baghdad that employs a self-made chef from Jalandhar.

'Matar paneer' is another delicacy prepared by Major Singh, a 28-year-old former construction worker from Nakodar district in Jalandhar who has been in Iraq for the past three-and-a-half years.

This is a critical month for Singh, a graduate of the Khalsa school in Nakodar, who says he will have no choice but to leave if the security situation further deteriorates.

The younger brother of a garment exporter and the son of Mohan Singh, a former Nakodar halwai, Major was once part of the same group of construction workers now being held hostage by ISIS militants in Mosul.

He was fortunate because he managed to leave two months earlier, before his friends and co-workers were detained, with his $400 per month salary paid up in full. What happens next, he says, is in God's hands.

Highly sensitive to where he lives and works, he is clean shaven and avoids wearing his karha, simply to avoid potential confrontation with any intolerant Islamic fundamentalist he might encounter on the streets of Baghdad or any other Iraqi city.

Indians in Iraq, he adds however, are in a better situation than Bangladeshi or Nepali workers who are totally marooned and complain that their governments are doing nothing for their welfare.

Meanwhile, Major and all other Punjabis still in Iraq have been keeping a watchful eye on the recently released Kerala nurses from the city of Tikrit, as well as others, who have been leaving in batches for India.

They include a group of 12 who recently fled their hospital 50 miles north of Baghdad. They say they liked their $600 a month jobs, but valued their lives more.

The 12 nurses were hired only four months ago following a visit to Delhi by officials of the Iraqi Ministry of Health. When they got to Baghdad, they were assigned them to the Al Sahara hospital of Al Muqdadiyah in Diyala district where daily gun battles and bomb blasts have now forced them to leave.

Diyala is one of the districts claimed by ISIS terrorists who have proclaimed an independent Islamic state or Caliphate in large parts of Syria and Iraq. Last December ISIS militants killed 18 oil and gas workers - most of them Iranians - as they dug a trench to extend a gas pipeline outside Al Muqdadiyah.

The nurses who were hired since those shootings to work at the Al Sahara gynaecological and paediatric hospital say the violence has been unremitting since they arrived last April.

Jositta, Shiji, Josini, Soumya, Anu, Anju, Jismy, Jiji, Bidhu, Bini, Aswathy and Lison, all aged between 25 and 28, say hospital doctors wanted them to stay, but the hospital head, Dr Yousra Hussein, told them, "Go to India because we don't know what will happen in Iraq."