Assassinations tear into Iraq's educated class --
By Jefferery Gettleman
Assassinations Tear Into Iraq's Educated Class
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: February 7, 2004
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 6 — Abdul al-Latif al-Mayah was never safe. Not before the war started, and not after.
A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Mayah, a 53-year-old political scientist and human rights advocate known in his neighborhood here as "the professor," was driving to work when eight masked gunmen jumped in front of his car. They yanked him into the street, the police said, and shot him nine times in front of his bodyguard and another university lecturer.
In an instant, he became one of hundreds of intellectuals and midlevel administrators who Iraqi officials say have been assassinated since May in a widening campaign against Iraq's professional class.
"They are going after our brains," said Lt. Col. Jabbar Abu Natiha, head of the organized crime unit of the Baghdad police. "It is a big operation. Maybe even a movement."
These white-collar killings, American and Iraqi officials say, are separate from — and in some ways more insidious than — the settling of scores with former Baath Party officials, or the singling-out of police officers and others thought to be collaborating with the occupation. Hundreds of them have been attacked as well in an effort to sow insecurity and chaos.
But by silencing urban professionals, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a spokesman for the occupation forces, the guerrillas are waging war on Iraq's fledgling institutions and progress itself. The dead include doctors, lawyers and judges.
"This works against everything we're trying to do here," the general said.
It has never been easy being part of the educated class in Iraq, certainly not under the repression by Saddam Hussein. Now, all over the country, it is a lethal business.
In Baghdad, Haifa Aziz Daoud, a high-ranking electricity manager, was shot dead through her front door in June. The deputy mayor, Faris Abdul Razzaq al-Assam, was also shot and killed near his home in October. Every member of the Baghdad City Council has been threatened, said Muhammad Zamil Saadi, a lawyer and council member.
"In the past, it was the party people who got the good jobs," said Mr. Saadi, who has two bullet holes in his windshield. "Now it is the professionals. These killers are desperate to go back to those times."
The American authorities say foreign terrorists may be behind the attacks. "There is a huge incentive for foreign terrorists to create chaos here," General Kimmitt said.
The Iraqi authorities point to former Baath Party elements or displaced military officers. They say the killings have been coordinated.
American and Iraqi officials say there is no tally of all the professionals assassinated. But Lt. Akmad Mahmoud, of the Baghdad police, said there had been "hundreds" of professionals killed in Baghdad.
Mr. Saadi, the Baghdad city council member who works closely with the police, estimated the number at from 500 to 1,000.
Colonel Natiha, the head of the organized crime unit, said there were too many to count. He blamed the general sense of lawlessness in Iraq, which is still struggling to form its own police forces.
General Kimmitt said the military was not involved in the investigations, though advisers from the F.B.I. were helping train Iraqi detectives.
Lieutenant Mahmoud, 28, says he has not met with any American advisers. He has been left to investigate Dr. Mayah's death by himself, one in a sea of similar cases.
In Basra, Asaad al-Shareeda, the dean of the engineering college, was assassinated in November. Two months later, Muhammad Qasim, a teacher in the technical college, was stabbed to death in his home.
In Mosul, Yousef Khorshid, an investigative judge, and Adel al-Haddidi, head of the local lawyer's association, were killed in drive-by shootings in December. The same car was seen by witnesses in both cases.
Iman al-Munim Yunis, director of the translation department at Mosul University, said someone recently slipped a note under her door. It read, "It's better to leave your job or you will face what you don't want." In the envelope was a bullet.
She resigned.
Several physicians have been killed. Many more have been threatened. Some have closed their practices. Others have held on.
"I was given one week," said Abid Ali Mahdi, director of the Institute of Radiotherapy and Nuclear Medicine in Baghdad. "But I can't quit. If I step down, nobody would come and take my place."
Dr. Mayah, the professor who was killed, had also refused to be intimidated. He spent years ducking the secret police under Mr. Hussein. As a member of the Shiite underground, he pushed for the overthrow of the government, his family recounted.
In the 1990's, he formed a secret society called United Iraq Is Our Home. He drove around at night in his blue Volkswagen, other activists said, slipping flyers out the window detailing the government's abuses.
Once, he pasted small messages onto Iraqi dinars, which he folded and left behind on buses and park benches. People would pick up the money and read about revolution.
"He was an old-fashioned activist, completely committed to the cause," said Sami Mahmoud al-Baydhani, a historian at Mustansiriyah University in Baghdad, where the professor served as director of Arab studies.
A few years ago, the secret police took the professor to their headquarters. "We have an expression," said Khalid Ali al-Mayah, the professor's brother, "anybody who goes into that building, comes out a body."
But one of the agents was a former student and let Dr. Mayah go. According to his family, he had many allies in the security services. They considered him the professor with nine lives.
His daughter and only child, Hiba, 16, used to sit up with him at night as he drafted fliers. Once, she asked him if he was scared.
"He told me, `If I'm scared and you're scared, who's going to do anything?' " Hiba recalled.
After the war, Dr. Mayah turned down an invitation to meet with Jay Garner, the former general who was first American administrator for Iraq. He told his friends that it was wrong that a military man should control the country.
Instead, colleagues said, the professor concentrated on human rights, going to a conference in Jordan and holding symposiums.
Then the threats started.
Last fall, the police said, a man came to his office and told him to close the human rights center at Mustansiriyah University. The professor told him to go away.
Two days before he was killed, his brother said, Dr. Mayah received a final threat: Resign or else.
He gave a stack of his papers to his secretary for safekeeping. He told his daughter that when the time came for marriage, she should consult with her uncle. It was as if he was saying goodbye.
"I knew my father was surrounded by danger," said Hiba, wearing a black veil and a black leather jacket, a product of two worlds. "I was closer to my father than to my own soul."
That last night, Dr. Mayah went into town for an interview with Al Jazeera, the Arab television network, in which he criticized the occupation and called for prompt elections.
The next morning, Jan. 19, Dr. Mayah left for work in his blue Mitsubishi. He made it as far as a dusty side street about a mile away.
"We had a pledge, to live together and die together," Khalid, the professor's brother, said as he started to cry. What hurts most, he said, is that after all the years his brot
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