Over 100 Iraqi Scientists Abducted
Gunmen wearing Iraqi police commando uniforms kidnapped up to 150 staff members from a government research institute in downtown Baghdad on Tuesday, the head of the parliamentary education committee said.
Alaa Makki interrupted a parliamentary session to say between 100 and 150 people, both Shiites and Sunnis, had been abducted in the 9:30 a.m. raid. He urged the prime minister and ministers of interior and defense to rapidly respond to what he called a "national catastrophe."
Makki said the gunmen had a list of names of those to be taken and claimed to be on a mission from the government's anti-corruption body.
Those kidnapped included the institute's deputy general directors, employees, and visitors, he said.
Police and witnesses said the raid began with gunmen closing off roads around the institute in the downtown Karradah district.
Police spokesman Maj. Mahir Hamad said the entire operation took about 20 minutes. Four guards at the institute put up no resistance and were unharmed, he said.
A female professor visiting at the time of the kidnappings said the gunmen forced men and women into separate rooms, handcuffed the men, and loaded them aboard about six pickup trucks. She said the gunmen, some of them masked, wore blue camouflage uniforms of the type worn by police commandos.
The abductions appeared to be the boldest in a series of killings and other attacks on Iraqi academics that are robbing Iraq of its brain trust and prompting thousands of professors and researchers to flee to neighboring countries.
Iraq's minister of higher education says he will close universities until security improves.
"I am not ready to see more professors get killed. I have only one choice which is to suspend classes at universities. We have no other choice," said Higher Education Minister Abed Theyab, adding he had already asked the interior and defense minstries to protect universities and the ministry's departments, to no avail.
Recent weeks have seen a university dean and prominent Sunni geologist murdered, bringing the death toll among educators to at least 155 since the war began. The academics apparently were singled out for their relatively high public stature, vulnerability and known views on controversial issues in a climate of deepening Islamic fundamentalism.
Ali al-Adib, a Shiite lawmaker, said there was little question Tuesday's incident was a mass kidnapping and demanded that U.S. troops be held responsible for the security lapse.
"The detention of 150 people from a government institution without informing the higher education minister ... means this is an abduction operation," al-Adib said.
"There is a political goal behind this grave action," he said.
In other recent developments:
The staggering violence occurred as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki promised to reshuffle his Cabinet after rebuking lawmakers for disloyalty and blaming Sunni Muslims for the country's raging sectarian conflict,
Also Sunday, the country's Sunni defense minister challenged al-Maliki's contention that the U.S. military should quickly pull back into bases and let the Iraqi army take control of security countrywide.
In the coming Cabinet shake-up, key lawmakers from al-Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party said, Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani was at the top of the list to lose his post because police and security forces were failing to rein in the unbridled sectarian killing that has reached civil war proportions in Baghdad and the center of the country.
Al-Bolani, a Shiite who was chosen in June and a month after al-Maliki's government was formed, is an independent. The United States demanded that the defense and interior posts be held by men who had no ties to the Shiite political parties that control militia forces.
Al-Maliki is under extreme pressure both from his people and the United States to curb violence, with Washington hammering on him to disband Shiite militias which are believed responsible, through their death squads, for much of the killing.
The interior minister controls police and other security forces which already are heavily infiltrated by the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army, the heavily armed wing of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's political movement. Al-Maliki is heavily dependent on both SCIRI and the Sadrists for his hold on power.
Defense Minister Abdul-Qadir al-Obaidi rejected calls by al-Maliki for the U.S. military to speed transfer of security operations throughout the country to the Iraqi army, saying his men still were too poorly equipped and trained to do the job.
"We are working hard to create a real army and we ask our government not to try to move too quickly because of the political pressure it feels. Our technical needs are real and that is very important, if we are to be a real force against insecurity," al-Obaidi said.
Al-Maliki aides, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to release the information, said the prime minister told U.S. President George W. Bush last month that Iraq would make renewal of the U.N. mandate that allows Washington to keep forces here conditional on U.S. agreement to quickly take troops off the streets.
Al-Maliki wants the Americans confined to bases for him to call on in emergency situations, but he boldly predicted his army could crush violence within six months if left alone to do the work.
The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey last month said it would take 12 to 18 months before Iraq's army was ready to take control of the country with some U.S. backup.