Some bad news of a per­sonal nature out of Iraq today. A sci­en­tist friend of my for­mer fixer in Iraq was shot and killed in traf­fic Mon­day:

BAGHDAD — A lead­ing Iraqi aca­d­e­mic and promi­nent hard­line Sunni polit­i­cal activist was fatally shot by three gun­men Mon­day as he was leav­ing his Bagh­dad home, police said.
The killers escaped in a car after gun­ning down Essam al-Rawi, head of the Uni­ver­sity Professor’s Union and a senior mem­ber of the influ­en­tial Asso­ci­a­tion of Mus­lim Schol­ars, accord­ing to police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razaq.
The asso­ci­a­tion is a Sunni orga­ni­za­tion believed to have links to the insur­gency rag­ing against U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies. The group has boy­cotted elec­tions and stood aside from the polit­i­cal process.
An asso­ci­a­tion offi­cial con­firmed the killing of al-Rawi, a geol­o­gist, say­ing he was behind the wheel of his car and had just left his home for the drive to work at Bagh­dad Uni­ver­sity accom­pa­nied by two body­guards.
The gun­men drove in front of al-Rawi’s car, forced it to stop, then sprayed it with auto­matic weapons fire, said the offi­cial, who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymity because he feared reprisal. One of al-Rawi’s body­guards was killed and the other was wounded, the offi­cial said.

I wrote about Dr. Al-Rawi in June 2004 for Seed Mag­a­zine, shortly after I got back to Iraq. I don’t remem­ber if the story ever ran or not as there was a pay­ment dis­pute, but here’s the story I wrote:

The sci­en­tists among the shell cas­ings
BAGHDAD — Dr. Isam al-Rawi, a geol­o­gist at Bagh­dad Uni­ver­sity, sweeps his hand over a set of dog-eared jour­nals. The arc of his ges­ture con­tin­ues on to include a bare lab­o­ra­tory with a few slices of rock sam­ples, a sag­ging chair and a drip­ping sink. The room is mean, long and nar­row, with barely enough room for a col­league to squeeze past al-Rawi car­ry­ing a tray of glasses filled to their chipped rims with Sprite. Finally his hand returns to the jour­nals and books, and he points an accus­ing fin­ger at them.
“I am a uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor,” he says. “I need books!“
Indeed, he needs a lot more than that, but few things sum up the cur­rent state of Iraq’s sci­en­tific cri­sis more than its lack of books and jour­nals. Al-Rawi’s most recent acqui­si­tion is a pho­to­copied ver­sion of the 1998 edi­tion of the Atlas of Rock Form­ing Min­er­als, which he bought in Libya on his last trip out­side Iraq. His most recent jour­nal, a copy of the Geo­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­ica Bul­letin, dates to August 1985. To a one, his books and jour­nals are old, out of date and falling apart, much like the country’s sci­en­tific com­mu­nity itself.
Before the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq’s sci­en­tists were some of the most respected in the region and they made a good liv­ing. The country’s uni­ver­si­ties churned out engi­neers, tech­ni­cians and Ph.D.s. They often did post-graduate work in the West and had access to the world’s sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture. They trav­eled to sci­en­tific con­fer­ences all over the world.
But things started to get bad in the mid-1980s when the Iran-Iraq war was rag­ing; Sad­dam Hus­sein began restrict­ing access to sci­en­tific jour­nals. After the dis­as­trous 1991 war and the impo­si­tions of sanc­tions, things took an even graver turn. Salaries plum­meted. Al-Rawi’s monthly income went from about $2,000 a month before the 1991 war to about $400 a month. New sci­en­tists and pro­fes­sors earned about $100 a month. They could not travel; they could not sub­scribe to peri­od­i­cals, as they were for­bid­den by the sanc­tions regime. New books were too expen­sive. Much needed equip­ment, which was often marked as “dual use,” was pre­vented from enter­ing the coun­try. The Mid­dle East’s most advanced sci­en­tific com­mu­nity was effec­tively sealed up in a time cap­sule.
But now, even with most of the restric­tions gone, things are still hard 15 months after Sad­dam Hus­sein was removed from power. While sci­en­tists are no longer pre­vented from order­ing new books and jour­nals and are allowed to leave the coun­try, they often can’t for the sim­ple rea­son that they have no money to do so. And a sin­is­ter series of killings has ter­ri­fied and dec­i­mated the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity. In mid-June, Sabri Al-Bayati, pro­fes­sor of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions at the col­lege of Sci­ence and Edu­ca­tion at Bagh­dad Uni­ver­sity was shot dead near his home in the Bab Al-Athamiya area in cen­tral Bagh­dad.‏ A few days pre­vi­ously, a physi­cian, Dr. Mohammed Abdul­lah Faleh al-Rawi (no rela­tion), was killed while sit­ting in traf­fic. Their deaths are just two of about 250 uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sors, med­ical doc­tors and engi­neers who have been killed since May 1, 2003.
“No one knows why, no one knows who,” al-Rawi says, and flicked his prayer beads back and forth.
In such an envi­ron­ment, there is no work on new research, says Dr. Nuhad Ali, a mechan­i­cal engi­neer at the uni­ver­sity. The only money being spent is to keep up the salaries of the pro­fes­sors, and the only new equip­ment are some com­put­ers paid for with the now-defunct oil-for-food pro­gram. The uni­ver­si­ties aren’t even accept­ing new grad­u­ate stu­dents, Ali says. All cur­rent grad­u­ate stu­dents, who used to receive a monthly stipend, were enrolled before the war.
But not all is hope­less, two solid state physi­cists, Dr. Izzat al-Essa and Dr. Raed al-Haddend, says they had been able to attend the Saudi Solid State Physics con­fer­ence in Riyadh in March. The praised the lift­ing of travel restric­tions, but says it was still very expen­sive.
Bagh­dad Uni­ver­sity was also lucky. Almost every other uni­ver­sity in the coun­try was looted in the civil unrest fol­low­ing the fall of Bagh­dad. But Amer­i­can troops decided to bivouac on the cam­puses of Bagh­dad Uni­ver­sity and the nearby Al-Nahrain Uni­ver­sity neé Sad­dam Hus­sein Uni­ver­sity. Their pres­ence pre­vented the whole­sale loot­ing of every­thing down to elec­tri­cal fix­tures that was going on just across town at al-Mustansiriya Uni­ver­sity.
So now the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity must rebuild with lim­ited finan­cial resources in a secu­rity vac­uum. It’s no won­der there’s an abid­ing sense of hope­less­ness among the pro­fes­sors. Al-Essa and al-Haddend dream of X-ray machines, elec­tron micro­scopes and FT-IR spec­trom­e­ters. Al-Rawi wants to replace his 1974 X-ray flu­o­res­cence machine so he can ana­lyze some rock sec­tions he recently took near Perispike in the Kur­dish area of north­ern Iraq. Dr. Emad T. Bakir, an indus­trial chemist with a spe­cialty in poly­mers, hopes for research assis­tants, cat­a­lysts and sol­vents.
But the money is sim­ply not there. The for­mer admin­is­tra­tor for the now-dissolved Coali­tion Pro­vi­sional Author­ity L. Paul Bre­mer III was found of say­ing, “Iraq is a rich coun­try that is tem­porar­ily poor.” The new gov­ern­ment is inher­it­ing many of Iraq’s old debts, includ­ing $29.8 bil­lion for war repa­ra­tions to Saudi Ara­bia and Kuwait, but the Tran­si­tional Admin­is­tra­tive Law, which is the work­ing con­sti­tu­tion for the interim gov­ern­ment, for­bids deficit spend­ing. All min­istries, includ­ing the Min­istry of Higher Edu­ca­tion, headed by Dr. Taher Kha­laf Jabur al-Bakaa, are feel­ing the vice grip of national poverty. The min­is­ter doesn’t even have a bullet-proof vest; he can’t afford one.
But if Iraqis are good at any­thing, it’s hop­ing. The sci­en­tific com­mu­nity is no excep­tion. Fuel­ing this hope is a promise promise from Bre­mer. Before he left June 28, he said he would attempt to increase com­mu­ni­ca­tions between Amer­i­can sci­en­tists at uni­ver­si­ties and their Iraqi coun­ter­parts. An Iraqi del­e­ga­tion recently returned from the Uni­ver­sity of Okla­homa whose pres­i­dent Bre­mer went to school with.
“We hope our friends in Amer­ica and Eng­land will come to see what has hap­pened to us,” says al-Rawi.

It should be noted that almost all of the mur­ders of uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sors have gone unsolved. Al-Rawi was work­ing to change that when he became a vic­tim himself.