Iraq sees 'brain drain' as professionals flee threats, violence

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.

In Amman, Kubasi, 63, spends his days sitting at a café with other professionals from Iraq.

Frustrated, he watches from afar as the medical education system he helped set up in his 36-year career slowly disintegrates.

His teaching doctors are fleeing in fear. Younger physicians are looking for other countries. Even patients are leaving, no longer confident in the care 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 childlike script, 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 business executives -- 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 as it tries 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 executives with the means to escape are going to Jordan, Syria, and Egypt or to Western countries. Those left behind say they feel abandoned.

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

''They are the ones with specialties from England or the USA. 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."

Exodus is not new to the country. Iraqis who could flee Saddam Hussein's repressive rule did: Poor Shi'ite Muslims sneaked across the border into Iran, and Sunnis 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 people's families hostage to guarantee returns.

Many of those émigrés flooded back into Iraq when Hussein's regime 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 saying goodbye to their homeland now.

Numbers are impossible to document, partly because those who leave often tell passport officials that they are going out of the country for a short trip. Often without telling friends, 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, 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.

Since the fall of Hussein, kidnapping has mushroomed into a lucrative business. Even children are snatched, to be ransomed for a few hundred dollars.

Anyone displaying signs of wealth, often professionals and business executives, are particular targets of kidnappers. Payment is no guarantee that a hostage will not simply be killed and dumped; some authorities say dozens of bodies are found every day but are 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. The death toll from sectarian violence among Sunnis, Shi'ites, 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, former head of Iraq's military medical corps, said he believes that. In late April, his secretary handed him a letter written in what he called ''bad Arabic" giving them all until May 6 -- 10 days -- to leave the country. He showed the letter to authorities, who suggested that 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 to create fall apart. ''The circuit of teaching, training, and care is being broken," 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."