Scientists become targets in Iraq

摘要

A chemist's mutilated body dumped on a street in Basra; a physicist shot twice in the back in Baghdad; a dean of engineering kidnapped by a hit squad, his body left on his wife's doorstep. Each week brings reports from Iraq of assassinations or kidnappings of scientists, academics and intellectuals, in what many argue is a systematic effort to eliminate or exile a group crucial to the country's reconstruction.