Author: Jeffrey Gettleman
Publication: The New York Times
Date: February 7, 2004
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 brother
secretly worked for democracy in Iraq, its arrival was just around the
corner.
"These people are not just assassinating
our brothers," he said. "They are assassinating our future."
