Still ashen-faced six days after escaping death, Dr Ali Faraj pulls his hair aside to display a scar above his left ear. One of Iraq’s top cardiologists, he was seeing a patient when a group of kidnappers wearing ski masks stormed into his Baghdad clinic, knocked his receptionist to the floor and when he emerged to investigate, ordered him to come with them.
To his surprise, they said they were taking him to the interior ministry. ”I know the minister so I said I would check if it was really necessary. I put out my hand to pick up the phone, but they knocked my arm aside and struck me on the head with a pistol butt. They dragged me to the front gate where a car was waiting,” he says, safe now, in Jordan.
”It was about 7pm, already dark. Suddenly we heard shots. I couldn’t tell where they were coming from. One of the kidnappers fell to the ground. He had been hit. Three of them started to lift him up. The fifth man ordered me into the car but I ran back to the clinic in the darkness.”
Only the next day did Faraj discover that the firing that saved him came from the garden of a tribal sheikh who lives opposite: ”The man’s bodyguards saw the gunmen going into my clinic, and were ordered by the sheikh to take cover and shoot if they were obviously abducting somebody when they came out.”
Who the kidnappers were remains a mystery. Were they criminals acting for money or, as they claimed to be, people linked to the police? What is certain is that a trickle of kidnappings and murders which began in the first lawless months after United States and British forces toppled Saddam Hussein three years ago has now become a flood. At least 1 000 people have died in the sectarian tit-for-tat killings that followed the destruction of one of Iraq’s holiest shrines in Samarra last month.
The growing insecurity has set off a massive brain drain, as more and more Iraqis slip away from the country. While the fall of Hussein opened the door for an earlier generation of Iraqi exiles to go home, now the flow is going the other way again. Kidnap survivors are the lucky ones. Hundreds of Iraqi professionals are being murdered in what some Iraqis see as a deliberate campaign to destroy the country’s best and brightest.
The ministry of higher education and scientific research says that 89 university professors and senior lecturers have been killed since 2003, and police investigations have led to nothing. Iraqi academics have compiled a longer list of up to 105 names of assassinated colleagues.
The rate of killing is increasing. About 311 teachers have been murdered in the past four months alone, according to the ministry of education. It is not only Baghdad that is suffering. The medical college in Mosul, a city in northern Iraq, has lost nine senior staff.
Even outside Iraq, fear consumes many exiles. In Jordan’s capital, Amman, the first port of call for most refugees, requests for interviews produced repeated rejections. Faraj is one of the few people who have fled who is willing to speak openly and be photographed. After eluding his would-be kidnappers, he fled to Jordan last week. In the chaos and looting that followed the US entry into Baghdad, he had already taken his wife and children to Amman, aiming to wait until the dust settled. It never did.
His family stayed in Jordan, but he commuted to Baghdad for several weeks at a time. ”That’s over now,” he says with grim determination. ”I will never go back to Iraq.”
Dr Azzam Kanbar-Agha, a British-educated surgeon, still makes the journey, though he too escaped a kidnapping last September. In Jordan he earns a third of what he did in Baghdad. So, despite the growing risk, he still goes back on short visits. But now he turns up at his clinic at random times. His receptionist gives patients an appointment but warns them there could be a long wait. In the afternoons he works at a crowded hospital where he feels there is safety in numbers.
One family that has strong evidence that the police are involved in hostage-taking are the Hilmis. The father, mother and four children in their 20s have had to swap their capacious home in a prosperous Baghdad suburb for a small flat in Amman. Ahmed (21) was with one of his sisters in their father’s medical supply store last year in Karrada, a busy Baghdad shopping area. His sister had the safe open when four men arrived. They displayed official IDs from an anti-terrorist squad. They put handcuffs on Ahmed and took $40 000 from the safe. Then they blindfolded him and bundled him into a vehicle for a 15-minute drive.
Ahmed could not identify the place where he was held, but says it must have been a government building since the electricity was never cut. He suspects it was the notorious Jadriyah detention centre, run by the interior ministry, where the Americans discovered close to 200 people in December whose bodies showed multiple signs of torture.
His family was asked to produce $250 000. The amount was too much, but they managed to raise $40 000. Ahmed was lucky. He was not mishandled in detention, and his kidnappers accepted the ”reduced” amount.
Similar stories can be heard from families in rented rooms throughout Amman. By some estimates, there are a million Iraqis in Jordan. Thousands of others have moved to Syria, Egypt and the Gulf States.
In one flat I found an elderly gynaecologist and her dentist husband, both with post-graduate qualifications gained in Britain. They left Iraq last year with their four children, all fluent English-speakers with university degrees. Now they are lost to Iraq. ”I love my patients. I didn’t want to leave them,” says the doctor.
With their various degrees, one might think a family like this could be an asset in Jordan and quickly settle in. But every Iraqi complains of Jordan’s tough immigration rules, under which they only get tourist entry permits for three days or a week. ”They hardly ever give residency permits to Iraqis. They’re afraid of competition,” says Ahmed Kamal (not his real name). ”So we have to take work illegally at a quarter of our Iraq salaries. Employers like it that way.”
The Jordanian authorities impose a fine of 1,50 dinars a day for every foreigner who overstays his or her permit. When they leave, the border police count the time since they came in and charge them. As a result, once in Jordan, many Iraqis say they cannot afford to leave. ”We’re trapped here. We can’t work and we can’t leave,” says a car mechanic from Najaf.
The new sectarian tensions have added to the pressure to escape from Iraq. Like thousands of other families in Baghdad, the Kamals are mixed Sunni and Shia. In the past they had no interest in what sect their friends were but now they find themselves beginning to want to know. Group-think is gaining ground. ”Most Sunnis think Shias are all traitors. Most Shias think Sunnis are all terrorists,” says Ahmed.
Slow-motion sectarian ”cleansing” is under way as minority groups leave home and move to Baghdad districts where their sect is in the majority.
Sectarianism is also being exploited for financial gain. Kandar-Agha says he has heard that an estate agent in Adamiyah, a mainly Sunni suburb in north Baghdad, was paying teenagers to deliver fliers to Shia houses, warning the occupants to leave. He hoped to buy their property cheap or get it to rent out.
In another Amman flat I met Muhammad Taha Yahir, the owner of a mini-market in Mosul, who had arrived in Jordan the previous day. ”I kept hoping things would improve, but now it’s hopeless.”
When will it be safe for Iraqi exiles to go back? The guesses range from gloom to the deepest pessimism. ”I see no chance of improvement for at least 10 years,” says Taha Yahir. ”Maybe we won’t live to see it get better,” says Kamal. He is not yet 30.
Muhammad Moher el Din is a leading Iraqi artist who arrived in Jordan last week. ”In Baghdad,” he says. ”There is a threat to everything civilised. The attacks are targeting doctors, artists, university people and everyone who represents civilisation.” Suspicion, mistrust, and fear are everywhere. ”Even our character is being changed. I feel it in me,” he says. — Â