Iraqi professor found dead in Basra

[Barrett808]

Baghdad - Gunmen kidnapped and killed a university professor in southern Iraq and a physician in a central city in separate incidents, police said on Friday.

Jumhour Karim Khammas, a professor at Basra University, was kidnapped and his body was found on Friday with three bullet wounds, Lieutenant Colonel Karim al-Zubaidi said.

Khammas, a Sunni Muslim and a former member of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, was kidnapped on Thursday, said Shaker al-Basri, a spokesperson for the Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential Sunni group.

Khammas headed the Arabic language department at Basra University before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, but was demoted to professor shortly after.

Meanwhile, gunmen abducted Dr Hussein Al-Shamari from his clinic in the central city of Samarra on Friday, police Captain Laith Mohammed said. His body was later found with several bullet wounds, he said.

Attacks against university professors were common after Saddam's overthrow because many of them had close ties to his regime. But it was not clear if Khammas' killing was linked to tensions between Iraq's Shi'a and Sunni communities. Basra is mostly Shi'a. - Sapa-AP

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=123&art_id=qw1120813560644B262

[Roland99]

1. See...all is well in the Brit-controlled south of Iraq

[Monkie]

2. "300 academics killed"

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2005-01-16-academics-assassinations_x.htm


i'm adding picture's where i find them to give a face to the witnesses

"Al-Rawi, a geologist at Baghdad University and head of the Association of University Lecturers, says about 300 academics and university administrators have been assassinated in a mysterious wave of murders since the American occupation of Iraq began in 2003. About 2,000 others, he says, have fled the country in fear for their lives.
~snip~
The attacks have caught the attention of the U.S. military and Iraqi security forces, but professors and university administrators say little progress has been made toward halting assassinations.
~snip~
In a country with distinct political, ethnic and religious fault lines, the university killings seem to follow no pattern. The dead have been Shiites and Sunnis, Kurds and Arabs, and supporters of various political parties. "They have a common thing: they are Iraqis," al-Rawi says."

hes not the first and everyone seems to wonder why its happening...

[pop goes the weasel]

3. Pol Pot

The obvious model for the assassins. Kill the educated classes; it makes it easier to disrupt and instill fear in everyone else.

[WhiteTara]

4. kill the intellectuals

then you have a stupid society that is more easily indoctrinated.
:shrug:

[Mandate My Ass]

5. Indoctrination has commenced: Iraqi 'justice' by television

Iraqi 'justice' by television

Every night the government-run al-Iraqiya television station carries lengthy confessions, under interrogation, from people like Ibrahim, who it says are captured insurgents.

The broadcasts have stirred a lot of interest among the Iraqi people, but unease among foreign observers who see it as an echo of the ousted Baathist regime's discredited practices.

The televised confessions, on a programme called "Terror in the Hands of Justice", are shown at prime time every night, and are clearly aimed at shocking the Iraqi public.

They portray the insurgents as bloodthirsty, venal, morally deviant, and religiously bankrupt.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4364157.stm

[WhiteTara]

6. Gosh, it sounds like

Mao and his gang. Remember the confessions in China? This could be a really nasty mess!

[MisterP]

7. it may not be all Iraqi fundamentalists, then...