Situation improving: An Iraqi policeman inspects the remains of a car bomb in the Jadriya district of Baghdad in December 2008. It was detonated to target a convoy of Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology, injuring two people. But officials insist violence has dropped 80 per cent since 2007 and are using financial incentives to tempt academics back to the country.
Credit: AFP
Two years ago many of Iraq's scientists would have feared the consequences of a U.S. presidential election won on a platform of the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
A campaign of assassinations had seen 340 academics murdered between 2005 and 2007. The concerted attempt to liquidate the country's intellectual elite, particularly its leading scientists and medical experts, drove thousands of researchers and practitioners abroad.
Bombings at universities pushed student attendance down to 30 per cent in many departments. In one incident at Baghdad's Mustansiriya University in January 2007, 70 students were killed and 170 injured.
A UNESCO study warned that targeted violence had brought the university system to the brink of collapse.
How times have changed. Violence has dropped 80 per cent since early 2007, according to U.S. estimates. Confident that the situation is stabilising, the U.S. has agreed to pull out combat troops by May 2010; the British will pull out by July 2009.
And Iraq's scientists are being urged to lead the country's redevelopment.
Raising scientific capacity
"The situation is much better now. Most of the country is safe," says Salam Khoshnaw, deputy minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research. "Of course we can't predict what will happen tomorrow or the day after. But many scientists have returned and, compared with two or three years ago, at each university I have found thousands of lecturers working without any problem."
The race is now on to pull Iraq out of the scientific backwater it has become through two decades of war, U.N. sanctions and dictatorship. In the 1970s and 1980s its higher education system was the envy of the Arab world. But since then it has been starved of resources and isolated from the rest of the world.
Khoshnaw says most academics in Iraq today have never visited foreign institutions. Now the government is trying to send as many scientists abroad as possible, in the hope of improving research capacity.
"This is our mission," says Khoshnaw. "Under Saddam Hussein's regime nobody could go anywhere to do research, but now we are opening the gates."
For a country that has lost so many experts to exile it might seem a high-risk strategy: last year the government sent 1,500 lecturers and students abroad at a cost of US$10 million.
