Violence like that at Virginia Tech is commonplace in Iraq's universities

Posted by Joshua Holland at 8:57 AM on April 17, 2007.

Just take a step back for a moment and think about how frightening those shootings at VA Tech were yesterday, and then consider -- painful though it may be to do so -- that Iraqis face that kind of massacre every day, and they have done so for several years. As Larry Johnson points out, below, 32 people died in Virginia on Monday and 65 perished in separate attacks in Iraq the day before. The latter hardly made the news.

Consider, also, a small piece of the nightmare that our government unleashed: the violence that's plagued Iraqi universities during the occupation.

IraqsSlogger ...

In Iraq, universities struggling to operate in the midst of a war zone have been struck repeatedly by bombings, shootings, assassinations, and abductions that have left behind hundreds of killed and wounded, victims and forced thousands of students and professors to stay away, or even leave the country.

On Monday, the same day as the Virginia Tech mass shooting, two separate shooting incidents struck Mosul University, one killing Dr. Talal Younis al-Jelili, the dean of the college of Political Science as he walked through the university gate, and another killing Dr. Jaafar Hassan Sadeq, a professor from the Faculty of Arts at the school, who was targeted in front of his home in the al-Kifaat area, according to Aswat al-Iraq.

In January, Baghdad's Mustansiriya University sufferred a double suicide bombing in January that killed at least 70 people, including students, faculty, and staff. A month later, another suicide bomber struck at Mustansiriya, killing 40.

Kidnappings of students and faculty are another all-too-common occurrence on Iraq's campuses. Members of the univerisity community have been abducted and murdered for sectarian reasons, or simply held for ransom. At a Baghdad University, one student reported to Slogger that he was abducted by sectarian thugs working in cooperation with the National Guard Forces who were supposed to be protecting the campus.

In January, students reported that violent events had threatened students and that attendance rates at Baghdad University had dropped to six percent.

Earlier this month, the Dr. Qais Jawad al-Azzawi, head of the Geneva-based Committee International Committee of Solidarity with Iraqi Professors said that 232 university professors were killed and 56 were reported missing in Iraq, while more than 3,000 others had left the country after the 2003 invasion.

I don't mean to minimize the tragedy that occurred yesterday in Virginia, and I certainly mean no disrespect to the victims. But it's easy to become inured to the horrors experienced every day by the Iraqi people since the U.S. attacked them in 2003; the fact is there's a calamity in Iraq almost every day, and that's been the case for four long years. There's nothing wrong with remembering that at a moment as tragic as this one.

Tagged as: iraq, virginia tech

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.