Murder of academics rings alarm bells: Iraq’s growing insecurity
By Jonathan Steele
AMMAN: Still ashen-faced six days after escaping death, Dr Ali Faraj pulls his hair aside to display a scar above his left ear. One of Iraq’s top cardiologists, he was seeing a patient when a group of kidnappers wearing ski-masks stormed into his Baghdad clinic, knocked his receptionist to the floor and when he emerged to investigate the noise, ordered him to come with them.
To his surprise, they said they were taking him to the interior ministry. “I know the minister so I said I would check if it was really necessary. I put out my hand to pick up the phone, but they knocked my arm aside and struck me on the head with a pistol butt. They dragged me to the front gate where a car was waiting,” he says, safe now in Jordan.
“It was about 7pm, already dark. Suddenly we heard shots. I couldn’t tell where they were coming from. One of the kidnappers fell to the ground. He had been hit. Three of them started to lift him up. The fifth man ordered me into the car but I ran back to the clinic in the darkness.”
Faraj was not totally unprepared for what has become a normal risk of Baghdad life. “I had a Kalashnikov in the clinic. My driver took it and started shooting. I also had a pistol in my drawer. The kidnappers drove off.”
The growing insecurity has set off a massive brain drain, as more and more Iraqis slip away from the country, perhaps never to return. While the fall of Saddam Hussein opened the door for an earlier generation of Iraqi exiles to go home, now the flow is going the other way again. Kidnap survivors are the lucky ones. Hundreds of Iraqi professionals are being murdered in what some Iraqis see as a deliberate campaign to destroy the country’s best and brightest. The Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research says that 89 university professors and senior lecturers have been killed since 2003, and police investigations have led to nothing.
Iraqi academics have compiled a longer list of up to 105 names of assassinated colleagues. The most recent was Professor Ali Muhawesh, the dean of the engineering college at Mustansiriya University, one of Baghdad’s two main campuses. He was shot this week.
The rate of killing is increasing. Some 311 teachers have been murdered in the past four months alone, according to the ministry of education. It is not only Baghdad that is suffering. The medical college in Mosul, a city in northern Iraq, has lost nine senior staff.
Even outside Iraq, fear consumes many exiles. In Amman, the first port of call for most refugees, requests for interviews produced repeated rejections. Others would only talk if false names were used and no mention made of where they work or live.
Faraj is one of the few people who have fled who are willing to speak openly and be photographed.
After eluding his would-be kidnappers, he fled to Jordan last week. In the chaos and looting which followed the US entry into Baghdad, he had already taken his wife and children to Amman, aiming to wait until the dust settled. It never did.
His family stayed in Jordan, but he commuted to Baghdad for several weeks at a time. “That’s over now,” he says with grim determination. “I will never go back to Iraq.”
Dr Azzam Kanbar-Agha, a British-educated surgeon, still makes the journey, though he too escaped a kidnapping last September. “My whole life has changed. My family is shattered. I’m a sociable person. I enjoyed sitting in cafes, meeting friends and talking politics, but that’s all over now. It’s too insecure in Iraq,” he says.
In Jordan he earns a third of what he did in Baghdad. So, despite the growing risk, he still goes back on short visits. His kidnappers did not get as close as the ones who stormed Faraj’s office, but the threat was equally sudden. At his clinic one day last September, Kanbar-Agha took a phone call from someone who announced, “We are the Mujahideen” (the resistance fighters). Assuming it was a friend playing the fool, he replied, “Come off it.”
“We’re serious,” the voice countered. “We’ve been watching your clinic and we want you to make a donation to help our cause. We’re fighting the Americans.”
When he asked what figure they had in mind, the voice whispered softly, “We don’t want to force you.”
“I told them I wasn’t used to this kind of talk. They suggested $10,000 (£5,750) and promised that no one else would bother me. I would be protected. I asked how I could be sure they were Mujahideen. They might be a gang. ‘If we were a gang’, the man said, ‘We would just kidnap you without a phone call’,” he recalls.
Kanbar-Agha was given two days to collect the money but a few hours later got a chillingly impatient text message: “You’re not worth negotiating with. We’re going to act.” Next day he threw away his mobile phone Sim card and fled to Jordan with his wife and daughter.
Despite the danger, he has been back to Baghdad twice. But now he turns up at his clinic at random times. His receptionist gives patients an appointment but warns them there could be a long wait. In the afternoons he works at a crowded hospital where he feels there is safety in numbers.
One family that has strong evidence that the police are involved in hostage-taking are the Hilmis. The father, mother, and four children in their 20s have had to swap their capacious home in a prosperous Baghdad suburb for a small flat in Amman. Ahmed, 21, who was in his last year at university, was with one of his sisters in their father’s medical supply store last autumn in Karrada, a busy Baghdad shopping area near the river Tigris. His sister had the safe open in the back room when four men arrived. They displayed official IDs from an anti-terrorist squad. They put handcuffs on Ahmed and marched into the back room where they took $40,000 from the safe. Then they blindfolded him and bundled him into a vehicle for a 15-minute drive. Ahmed could not identify the place where he was held but says it must have been a government building since the electricity was never cut. He suspects it was the notorious Jadriyah detention centre, run by the interior ministry, where the Americans discovered close to 200 people in December whose bodies showed multiple signs of torture.
His family was asked to produce 25 daftar, or notebooks, a slang phrase for a bundle of 100 $100 bills. The amount was too much, but they managed to raise $40,000. Ahmed was lucky. He was only held for five days. He was not mishandled in detention, and his kidnappers accepted the ‘reduced’ amount of $40,000. When the family got the money together, he was dumped back on the street. The next day, the Hilmis fled after quietly moving suitcases to the homes of relatives. They did not dare tell their neighbours they were leaving. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service
