WP: Professionals Fleeing Iraq As Violence, Threats Persist (Iraq)

[Pirate Smile]

Professionals Fleeing Iraq As Violence, Threats Persist
Exodus of Educated Elite Puts Rebuilding at Risk

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 23, 2006; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- The office of Iraq's most eminent cardiologist is padlocked. A handwritten sign is taped on his wooden door in the private clinic in Baghdad: Patients of Dr. Omar Kubasi should call him in Amman, Jordan.

There, Kubasi, 63, spends his days sitting at a cafe with other physicians and professionals from Iraq. Frustrated, he watches from afar as the medical education system he helped set up during his 36-year career slowly disintegrates. His teaching doctors are fleeing the country in fear. Younger physicians are looking for other countries to train in. Even patients are leaving, no longer confident in the care they can get in Iraq.

"I think it's part of the plan for the country's destruction," Kubasi said by telephone. "The situation in the last six months has gotten so bad, we couldn't continue."
Kubasi left Baghdad in May after he and nine other doctors received letters, written in a childish hand, telling them they would be killed if they did not stop working in their native Iraq. He and his colleagues had been the objects of threats before, but the last carried a foreboding urgency, he said.

Iraq's top professionals -- doctors, lawyers, professors -- and businessmen have been targeted by shadowy political groups for kidnapping and ransom, as well as murder, some of them say. So many have fled the country that Iraq is in danger of losing the core of skilled people it needs most just as it is trying to build a newly independent society.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/22/AR2006012201112.html

[Dunvegan]

1. Iraq: Meet Bush's Handbasket...

...Handbasket: Meet Hell.

[rodeodance]

2. this has been going on since our invasion.

[saigon68]

8. YES " Freedom is on the March"

----spoken by THE CHIMPANZEE

[rodeodance]

3. Lots of people will be reading this--"progress" is not on the radar....

"They may come back if it's safe," Fayed said.

Or they may not. Since the fall of Hussein, kidnapping has mushroomed into a lucrative business. Even children are snatched, to be ransomed the same day for a few hundred dollars from their distraught parents.

Anyone displaying signs of wealth, often professionals and businessmen, are particular targets of kidnappers in search of high ransoms. However, payment is no guarantee a hostage will not simply be killed and dumped; some authorities claim dozens of bodies are found every day but never reported.

That danger is overlaid by the activities of an insurgency that aims to terrify the society by means of bombings, murder and abduction -- or threats. In addition, the death toll from sectarian violence among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds has climbed steadily.

[rodeodance]

4. read the entire article--worth it.

[MindMatter]

5. Now let me get this straight

These are people who lived in Iraq through most or all of Saddam's regime, and they NOW find the country intolerable?

[Libby2]

6. You haven't been paying attention, have you?

[IndianaGreen]

7. They had peace and security

They no longer have that, plus the entire country's infrastructure has been wrecked by the US invasion. You can't use the Bible as a source for foreign policy!

I wish all those idiots that supported this war would move to Iraq and enjoy the fruits of the horrors they have brought to the Iraqi people.

"Of course I would leave if I could," said Ihana Nabil, 22, who will soon graduate from Baghdad University with a degree in political science. "There's no peace, no stability and no jobs here," she said. Other students at the campus, a temporary oasis in a violent city, agreed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/22/AR2006012201112.html

[LynnTheDem]

10. Iraqis WORSE OFF NOW than under Hussein

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=81400

Gee what a surprise not.

[wordpix2]

9. thanks for bringing "freedom" to the Iraqi people, moron *