Free Republic

MOSUL, Iraq (AFP) — Gunmen on Sunday kidnapped 42 university students near Iraq's northern city of Mosul, while a US air strike in eastern Baghdad killed nine people, officials said. Iraq's political leaders, meanwhile, urged that militias throughout the country be disbanded in a move seen as pressuring radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to rein in his fighters ahead of provincial elections in October. Local army commander Brigadier General Khalid Abdul Sattar said the gunmen ambushed two buses which were ferrying students to Mosul from their homes in Shurkat, 70 kilometres (40 miles) south of Iraq's main northern city. "Unidentified gunmen...

BAGHDAD (AP) - Students in Baghdad, where universities have been hard hit by violence, said Monday they were saddened by last week's massacre at Virginia Tech and hung up a banner to express their solidarity with ``our brothers in humanity and in pursuing knowledge.'' ``We want to let the whole world know that we do not support terrorism anywhere,'' said Yassir Nazar, head of the student union at Baghdad Technology University, who organized the hanging of the banner near the campus gate. It reads, ``We, the students of Technology University, denounce the attack at Virginia Tech. We extend our condolences...

February 18, 2005 A Harvard "Education" for Iraqi Students   Iraq's universities were ignored during the long dark night that was Saddam's reign. In that, they share some of the problems faced by Eastern European universities after the Wall fell: aging infrastructures, a cowed and politicized professoriate and student body, and the effects of a generation of isolation from the world's great centers of higher learning.Therefore, it's heartening to know that some Iraqi students are now able to travel abroad -- something nearly impossible to before -- to be exposed to Western higher education. Or at least, it would...