In a grim escalation of violence against Iraqi higher education, gunmen attacked the offices of a government education agency in Baghdad last week and abducted scores of male employees and visitors. A number of the hostages were freed in police raids that evening. But officials differed about how many had been kidnapped, how they had been treated, and how many had been freed.
Iraq’s minister of higher education responded to news of the midmorning attack, on November 14, by going to the Parliament building and angrily interrupting a nationally televised session to denounce lawmakers for not protecting the country’s academics.
The minister, Abed Dhiyab al-Ajili, said he was ordering the country’s universities closed until the security situation improved. He said he was “not ready to see more professors killed.”
Later in the day, however, Mr. al-Ajili rescinded the closing order after the police and the army promised to increase security at buildings of the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research and at the universities.
On the day after the abductions, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki went to the University of Baghdad and promised better security and no disruptions to education. Mr. al-Ajili has threatened to resign if the security situation does not improve.
The number of people abducted in the raid was unclear. Mr. al-Ajili’s office said 120 to 150 people had been taken away by the gunmen, and that 50 to 70 were released a day or so later. On November 16, Mr. al-Maliki said some of those released claimed that they had been badly beaten while in captivity, and that some of those kidnapped were rumored to have been killed.
The prime minister’s office said that only about 40 people had been taken hostage, and that all but a handful of them had been released. On the evening of the kidnappings, the Interior Ministry announced that it had arrested five senior police officers in connection with the incident, which took place at a building housing the Scholarships and Cultural Relations Directorate, an agency of the ministry that sends academics and students abroad for research and study.
The latest attack follows months of increasing violence aimed at faculty members as Iraq’s general security worsens. On November 2, gunmen killed Jassim al-Asadi, a Shiite who was dean of the University of Baghdad’s College of Administration and Economics, along with his wife and son. Four days earlier, Essam al-Rawi, a Sunni who led the University Professors Union, was murdered.
According to Iraq’s Ministry of Higher Education, at least 155 academics have been murdered since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. But John R. Akker, executive secretary of the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics, which is based in London, says the actual number is more than 350.
In recent weeks, several faculty members have received envelopes containing bullets, said Mr. Akker. The letters, sent by the internal mail systems of their institutions, were meant as death threats, he said.
On the day of the attack, Koïchiro Matsuura, director general of Unesco, appealed to the gunmen for the immediate release of the hostages. Over recent months, he said in a written statement, intellectuals and academics “have been deliberately targeted in a campaign of bloodshed and violence.”
Well-Organized Attack
Officials of Unesco and other groups monitoring the situation say they fear an acceleration of a brain drain from Iraq, as more and more academics decide that the situation is too dangerous for them to remain in the country.
A former dean of the University of Baghdad, who fled and is now a visiting professor at an American university, blames the attacks on the sectarian militias, especially the Mahdi Army, a group controlled by the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. They want to “get rid of the educated people and create a vacuum to be filled by them,” said the academic, who asked not to be identified, out of fear for the safety of family members still in Iraq.
Despite the confusion over the number of people abducted, there was considerable agreement as to how the well-coordinated raid was carried out.
According to witnesses and the police, at around 10 a.m., a group of several dozen men dressed in blue camouflage uniforms, of the kind used by police commandos, drove up in cars and trucks without license plates. The attackers had first closed off the streets around the four-story building in the Karradah section of downtown Baghdad, just across the Tigris River from the highly fortified Green Zone. The middle-class neighborhood was considered relatively safe.
The Associated Press quoted Alaa Makki, leader of the Parliament’s education committee, as telling the session that the gunmen said they were from the government’s anti-corruption unit. Other accounts had the attackers explaining that they were “clearing the way” for the American ambassador, who would soon be traveling along the road outside.
The gunmen then swept through the building. They locked the women in one room, where they were left unharmed but without their cellphones. Any men found in the building, whether employees or visitors, were taken away in the attackers’ vehicles.
Mr. al-Ajili, the higher-education minister, said he had recently written to the prime minister asking for better protection for universities and education buildings. The defense and interior ministers had rejected previous requests for 800 campus guards, he said.
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 53, Issue 14, Page A46