US AND THEM: US, UN & Iraq, version 8.0

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; 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.

"It's creating a brain drain," said Amer Hassan Fayed, assistant dean of political science at Baghdad University. "We could end up with a society without knowledge. How can such a society make progress?"

Professionals and businessmen with the means to escape are going to Jordan, Syria, Egypt or, if they have visas, to Western countries. Those left behind say they feel abandoned.

Ahmed Meer Ali, a 27-year-old resident doctor, is left alone to man the private hospital where Kubasi's office is locked and shuttered. Most of the specialists who worked there, providing care to patients and guidance to Ali, have left.

"They are the ones with specialties from England or the U.S.A. They were the ones teaching me," he said. "Now, some patients even go to Iran to get care. In the past, no one in Iraq would go to Iran."

And many educated young Iraqis are hoping to follow.

"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.

Exodus is not new to the country. Iraqis who could flee Saddam Hussein's repressive rule did: Poor Shiite Muslims sneaked across the border into Iran, and Sunni Arabs crossed the mountains into Syria or the desert to Jordan. People often waited years for permission to attend a seminar or do business in another country and then would disappear there. Hussein began holding such people's families hostage to guarantee their return.

Many of those émigrés flooded back into Iraq when Hussein fell. But the country's instability and daily regimen of violence have made some reconsider their return. Others who stayed throughout Hussein's rule are finally saying goodbye to their homeland now.

Numbers are impossible to document, partly because those who leave often tell passport officials they are going out of the country for a short visit. Often without telling friends or neighbors, they take a few things from their homes, lock the doors and vanish.

An official at the Interior Ministry's statistics office said the number of Iraqis traveling overland to Jordan held steady at about 200 to 250 a day from July 2004 to June 2005. Since last July, however, the number crossing the border -- excluding truckers and traders -- has ballooned to 1,100 a day, according to the official.

"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.

"Professors have been threatened. Doctors have been killed in their clinics. Killing has become common," Fayed said. "Some people believe this is intentional, to try to empty Iraq of its elite."

Kubasi, the former head of Iraq's military medical corps, believes that. In late April, his secretary handed him a letter written in what he called "bad Arabic" giving them all by May 6 -- 10 days -- to leave the country. He showed the letter to authorities, who suggested he had faked it. By May 8, Kubasi was in Jordan.

His three sons and his daughter are all physicians. They could not risk staying, he said.

"Every day, we sit here, 10 or 12 of us, senior professionals, just discussing the situation," Kubasi said from Amman. "It's mental death to sit here. But even my patients say I should not come back. Really, really, I could not pay for a kidnapper's ransom. And in that case, you would be killed."

It frustrates him to watch the medical training system he helped create fall apart. "The circuit of teaching, training and care is being broken. It may not be recovered," he said.

"Our medical schools and doctors are known all over the Arab world. The teaching care was excellent, based on the British system. We were successful under Saddam Hussein to start our own postgraduate studies, including many medical specialties. Now they are ridding the country of all of this."

Um Mustafa and her husband, a businessman, had hoped to stay. But they abandoned that goal when thieves burst into their bedroom, held their young son in a headlock, with a gun to his head, and demanded that his parents hand over all their gold and jewelry.

"We didn't want to leave," said Um Mustafa, 27, who still fears attack and asked not to be fully identified. "We were a very happy family. Wealthy. My husband had a good job. We had money, a house, car and servants."

The men terrorized the family for more than two hours, threatening to kill or kidnap their 6-year-old son, while their 2-year-old cried. They beat Um Mustafa's husband, finally leaving when they were satisfied they had found all the jewelry, guns and money in the house. They left the couple bound with plastic handcuffs and locked in a room, saying they would burn the house as they left.

"Maybe God wanted to give us a new life," Um Mustafa said. "They didn't kill us."

She and her husband decided to move to Jordan. But they heard that Jordanian authorities, worried about the influx, were making life more difficult for Iraqis there. So they have bought tickets to Cairo instead.

"We don't know how we will live there. My husband will have to find a new job. I will go to work," she said. "Leaving the country was not an easy decision. Any time you start a new life, it's very difficult. But it will be better than staying here in a country were there is no safety anymore.

"I've been through four wars. I never, never felt like leaving before," Um Mustafa said. "Now, life in Iraq has become unsafe. I don't feel safe in my own bedroom -- or in the whole country."

More than 2,000 Iraqi civilians murdered per month before Saddam was removed.

Hey anyone read this book yet?

Book 'endorsed' by Bin Laden storms US chart

Mr Blum has described the attacks on 11 September as "an understandable retaliation against US foreign policy", stopping short of calling that a justification.
Once an employee of the State Department until his career was cut short after he led demonstrations against the Vietnam War, Mr Blum, 72, has been taken aback by his sudden celebrity. News networks in the US are clamouring to interview him. "The Washington Post refuses to publish my letters, but now they are coming to my house," he told reporters.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article340375.ece

Quote:

More than 2,000 Iraqi civilians murdered per month before Saddam was removed.

Why would you write a thing that you know is untrue?
...

...
In the tape, bin Laden said he was directing his message to the American people after polls showed that "an overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq but (Bush) opposed that desire."

He said insurgents were winning the conflict in Iraq and warned that security measures in the West and the United States could not prevent attacks there.

"The proof of that is the explosions you have seen in the capitals of European nations," he said "The delay in similar operations happening in America has not been because of failure to break through your security measures. The operations are under preparation and you will see them in your homes the minute they are through (with preparations), with God's permission."

The al-Qaida leader did not spell out conditions for a truce in the excerpts aired by Al-Jazeera.

"We do not mind offering you a long-term truce with fair conditions that we adhere to," he said. "We are a nation that God has forbidden to lie and cheat. So both sides can enjoy security and stability under this truce so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been destroyed in this war.

"There is no shame in this solution, which prevents the wasting of billions of dollars that have gone to those with influence and merchants of war in America," he said.

In an Arabic transcription of the entire tape on the Al-Jazeera Web site -- but not aired -- bin Laden makes an oblique reference to how to prevent new attacks on the United States, but does not specify if these are conditions for a truce.

Bin Laden tells Americans that "if you are sincere in your desire for peace and security, and if Bush refuses to do anything but continue lies and oppression," then he recommends Americans read a book entitled "The Rogue State," apparently a reference to a book of that title by political analyst William Blum. The book has been published in Arabic.

"In its introduction, it states: 'If I were president, I would stop the attacks on the United States: First I would give an apology to all the widows and orphans and those who were tortured. Then I would announce that American interference in the nations of the world has ended,"' he said

January 09, 2006
Bin Laden Reported Dead (Again)
Is bin Laden dead? I've no idea. Let us pray that this time the reports turn out to be true. Michael Ladeen reports over at NRO (hat tip: Ron):

And, according to Iranians I trust, Osama bin Laden finally departed this world in mid-December. The al Qaeda leader died of kidney failure and was buried in Iran, where he had spent most of his time since the destruction of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Iranians who reported this note that this year's message in conjunction with the Muslim Haj came from his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for the first time.
What sources, I wonder, does Ladeen have that, say, the CIA doesn't have? Personally I'm not impressed by the unidentified sources. However, a fair amount of circumstantial evidence exists that bin Laden is dead. Evidence, though, is not proof. Until we have a body I will assume otherwise and if bin Laden is still alive I believe we are looking on the wrong continent all together. Try Africa and start with Somalia.

Posted by Dr. Rusty Shackleford at January 9, 2006

Osama Bin Laden Passed Away 3 Weeks Ago?
January 12, 2006
And, according to Iranians I trust, Osama bin Laden finally departed this world in mid-December. The al Qaeda leader died of kidney failure and was buried in Iran, where he had spent most of his time since the destruction of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Iranians who reported this note that this year’s message in conjunction with the Muslim Haj came from his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for the first time.
...

CIA Confirms Bin Laden's Voice On New Tape

POSTED: 10:26 am EST January 19, 2006
UPDATED: 5:12 pm EST January 19, 2006

CAIRO, Egypt -- Al-Jazeera on Thursday aired an audiotape from Osama bin Laden, who says al-Qaida is making preparations for attacks in the United States but offers a truce on "fair" but undefined conditions.

The tape's release came days after a U.S. airstrike in Pakistan that was targeting bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, and reportedly killed four leading al-Qaida figures, including possibly al-Zawahri's son-in-law. There was no mention of the attack on the segments that were broadcast.

It was the first tape from the al-Qaida leader in more than a year - the longest period without a message since the Sept. 11 2001 suicide hijackings in the United States.

The CIA has authenticated the voice on the tape as that of bin Laden, an agency official said. The al-Qaida leader is believed to be hiding in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Al-Jazeera said the tape was recorded in the Islamic month that corresponds with December.
...

Iraqi Shiite Cleric Pledges to Defend Iran
Sadr, With Powerful Militia, Vows to Respond to Attack by West on Neighbor

By Ellen Knickmeyer and Omar Fekeiki
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 24, 2006; A13



BAGHDAD, Jan. 23 -- An Iraqi Muslim cleric who leads a major Shiite militia pledged to come to the defense of neighboring Iran if it were attacked, aides to the cleric, Moqtada Sadr, said Monday.

The commitment, made Sunday in Tehran during a visit by Sadr, came in response to a senior Iranian official's query about what the cleric would do in the event of an attack on Iran. It marked the first open indication that Iraq's Shiite neighbor is preparing for a military response if attacked in a showdown with the West over its nuclear program.

The pledge was also one of the strongest signs yet that Iraq could become a battleground in any Western conflict with Iran, raising the specter of Iraqi Shiite militias -- or perhaps even the U.S.-trained Shiite-dominated military -- taking on American troops here in sympathy with Iran.

Hey anyone read this book yet?

Book 'endorsed' by Bin Laden storms US chart

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article340375.ece

I have told you more than once that Ledeen is a traitor who is pushing for a war with Iran, Ican. You cannot trust anything he writes!
Why should I trust anything you write? You rarely provide an explanation of why you believe what you claim you believe. Here you claim Ledeen (sic) (i.e., Michael Ladeen) "is a traitor" but offer no evidence to support that accusation. It is not obviouus to me that "pushing for a war with Iran" is intrinsically traitorous. Lots of lefties here have argued that invading Iran would have been a better choice than invading Iraq.

By the way:

Michael Ladeen over at NRO wrote:

Is bin Laden dead? I've no idea. Let us pray that this time the reports turn out to be true.

I hope this latest example helps prove that to you...
How does this post of yours about Ladeen's statement "help prove" anything about Ladeen?

Do a cross-search with Ledeen and Gorbanifar, research more yerself.
Ladeen wrote he has no idea whether bin Laden is dead or not. Do you think he actually does know? If so, why do you believe that? What specifically are you recommending I search for?

Cycloptichorn