Azzaman, August 26, 2011


Unidentified gunmen have killed another university professor in Baghdad, the latest victim of a bloody campaign targeting the cream of Iraqi intelligentsia.

Baghdad University’s Professor Hussein Kadhem was shot dead by a silencer gun as he left his home for work in Baghdad’s al-Adel neighborhood.

Scores of university professors have been killed in Baghdad since the 2003 U.S. invasion, most of them in al-Adel, a neighborhood inhabited mainly by university faculty members.

There are no exact figures on the number of Iraqi intellectuals and scientists who have been killed since the U.S. invasion.

But conservative estimates put the number at more than 300, among them highly qualified doctors, nuclear scientists and physicists.

The violence targeting Iraqi scientists has forced many of them to flee the country.

Iraqis with higher degrees from top Western universities make a large portion of faculty at universities in Jordan and Arab Gulf states

Hospitals and research centers in the Gulf welcome Iraqi scientists.