Iraq-six years after United States led invasion:

Intellectual crime

Latheef Farook

All over the world and throughout human history intellectual community, which contributes for the political, economic, social, cultural progress of any society, has been the prime asset of any country.

Yet, eliminating the intellectual society as a whole has been one of the targets of the US and Britain when former President George Bush and the former British Prime Minister invaded Iraq that was already virtually destroyed under US- UK sponsored United Nations economic sanctions described by UN officials themselves as a form of genocide.

Under this program, hundreds of top Iraqi professionals, academics and other intellectuals were systematically killed. In the early stage of the invasion, around May 2003, there were reports that Israel’s secret service Mossad arrived with a list of names and addresses of more than 1000 top intellectuals and killed them in their houses, offices, cars along the streets and other places.

Though the pro-Jewish Western media failed to highlight these crimes against humanity, reports surfaced in early 2006, when a petition to the United Nations, signed by Nobel Prize winners Harold Pinter, J. M. Coetzee, Jos‚ Saramago and Dario Fo as well as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Cornel West and Tony Benn pointed out that hundreds of Iraqi academics and professionals had been assassinated since March 2003.

The exact number killed was not known. However, some estimates put the figure at over several thousands. This included specialists in physical education, journalism, doctors, lawyers, architects, Arabic literature and the sciences and physicians; Baghdad University alone lost around eighty top professionals.

For example Dr. Abdullateef al-Mayah, a well-known academic, was killed 12 hours after he criticized the Iraqi Governing Council on Al-Jazeera television.

The dean of the college of law in Mosul was in bed with her husband when the murderers entered her home and cold-bloodedly shot both of them in their bed before cutting off their heads with knives. Armed men fired a stream of bullets at Professor Nawfal Ahmed, of the institute of fine arts when he was leaving his home for work.

Dr. Wissam Al-Hashimi, a geologist and internationally known expert in carbonates, was kidnapped early in the morning on 24 August 2005, while leaving for work and later killed, despite his ransom being paid. Gripped with fear, Iraqi professionals continue to flee the country in large numbers.

Even today death threats, often letters accompanied by a single live bullet, are common. A leading Iraqi cardiologist, Dr. Omar Kubasi, left Baghdad after he and nine other doctors received letters threatening to kill them if they did not stop working in their native Iraq. He now lives as an exile in Amman, Jordan. Their only crime was they opposed the American occupation of their country.

Though everybody knows who the culprits are, nobody dares identify them due to the devastating consequences. Therefore, no one was arrested or prosecuted for any of the murders.

The prime suspects were Israel’s Mossad, which assassinated leading Iraqi scientists working on the country’s nuclear program in the 1980s and 1990s, the American troops, with a long record of harassing and beating Iraqi intellectuals and death squads of Iraqi Interior Ministry of the US-installed Government.

According to reports, the appearance of death squads in Iraq significantly increased after the installation of John Negroponte, nicknamed ‘Ambassador of Death Squads’. , as the US ambassador to Iraq in June 2004.

The killing of historians, geologists, writers, artists and other intellectuals resulted in a massive decline in the quality of higher education and with the best professors either dead or fleeing the country the real losers are the next generation, the future of Iraq. In fact the country’s intelligentsia was already depleted during 1990 and 2003 when an estimated 30 percent had left the country for economic reasons.

According to the UN’s International Leadership Institute, “Eighty four percent of Iraq’s higher learning institutions have been burnt, looted or destroyed.” The assassinations and the flight of Iraqi professionals are the most criminal part of eliminating Iraqi society.

They did not stop there! Even the dead and buried were not spared! Perhaps, in their cruelty Bush and Blair surpassed even the 11th Century Mongol Emperor Genghis Khan who turned Baghdad into a slaughterhouse.

In Northern Baghdad, US troops attacked Ahdamiya Mosque with missiles while a shoulder-fired rocket was used to blast open the door to the catafalque containing the body of an 8th Century Muslim saint Abu Haniffa. Not leaving the dead and buried in peace, they bombed a number of graveyards and destroyed the Ahdamiya cemetery behind the mosque.