The Destruction of Iraq's Educational System Under US Occupation

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The Ultimate War Crime, Killing the Children:
The Destruction of Iraq’s Educational System under US Occupation
by Ghali Hassan
www.globalresearch.ca 11 May 2005

The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HAS505B.html

"The Education system in Iraq, prior to 1991, was one of the best in the region, with over 100% Gross Enrolment Rate for primary schooling and high levels of literacy, both of men and women. The Higher Education, especially the scientific and technological institutions, were of an international standard, staffed by high quality personnel". (UNESCO Fact Sheet, 28 March 2003)

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Iraq’s education system has also fallen victim to the Occupation-instigated violence. School dropouts are very high, particularly among females as a result of violence and kidnappings. Many schools in Iraqi cities and towns have been closed, preventing hundreds of children from receiving basic education. "Approximately 50 percent of children are not going to school because their parents are too scared to send them, having heard these stories about children being kidnapped and held for ransom", a spokesman for Save the Children UK, Paul Hetherington, told IRIN. Moreover, malnutrition amongst Iraqi children has almost doubled from 4 per cent in 2002 to roughly 8 per cent since the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The ongoing Occupation and associated violence is wreaking havoc on Iraqi children and Iraq long-term future.

Although the UNU report noted briefly that only "our dozens academics have been assassinated", the real number is much higher. In a callous and murderous policy termed "DeBaathification", thousands of academics, scientists and prominent Iraqi politicians have been murdered. Together with the C.I.A., and Israel’s Mossad agents, criminal elements and militia groups including, the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade, the INA of Iyad Allawi and the INC of Ahmed Chalabi, have terrorised an entire nation and murdered its entire intellectual community.

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The deliberate U.S. strategy targeting anything other than "strictly military targets", including Iraq’s educational system, constitutes a major war crime. In addition, legal evidence has shown that the war on Iraq amounted to a ‘crime of aggression’. Clearly, U.S. wars against Iraq violated the 1923 Hague Rules of Aerial Warfare (Article 22) and the 1949 Geneva Convention IV Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War (Article 3).