[LINK] "Fleeing doctors threaten Iraq's health"

[rfmcdonald]

"Like South Africa in the '70s, the best, and most needed, keep departing," the one-line introduction at the Andrew Chung's article from The Toronto Star earlier this week says, only--it seems--things are much worse than that.

It was a cool spring day in Baghdad. Dr. Rafid al-Nassar and his wife, Dr. Rasha al-Manahi, were venturing out of their house to buy groceries, when gunmen in dark balaclavas drove up in a jet-black Daewoo.

In an instant, they had him on his knees and tied his hands; then they were dragging al-Manahi to the car. Both doctors were screaming, knowing she was about to be kidnapped. Luckily he'd been able to put down their 1 1/2-year-old son in the melee.

As they were pushing her into the car, a neighbour, a former Iraqi soldier, emerged from his house, firing a gun into the air.

"He tried shooting to the sky to make them afraid, so they left us," says the 33-year-old al-Nassar. "But they kicked her in her back and her face, and me as well."

Then they sped off.

That was the moment, in 2005, when they realized it was time to leave Iraq. They abandoned the country, leaving everything, for Jordan, where they applied to the United Nations as refugees, and to Canada as immigrants.

Three weeks ago they arrived in Toronto, and are living in a small apartment in North York. They now have two children, and heavy hearts. "I feel sad because many people are dying every day," al-Nassar says. "My job is to be there to help the Iraqi people but I can't because I have a family and I don't want them to die."

Faced with a kind of Sophie's choice, Al-Nasser became one of thousands of doctors and specialists to leave Iraq since the invasion, which began five years ago this week. The extremism, violence, and sectarianism that has sprung up since is well established. But one of the most tragic legacies has to be the emptying of the kinds of people Iraq needs the most.

Some 70 per cent of Iraq's most qualified doctors have left since 2003, according to estimates of the Iraqi medical establishment. Among the highest qualified "consultant" doctors, 80 per cent are gone.

[. . .]

Canada's diaspora is quite small. The 2006 census pegged the number at 33,545, half of them in Greater Toronto.

At the urging of friends or family, some doctors came to Canada, where they are trying to settle while balancing a sense of guilt for abandoning the country they love.

Canadian Medical Association data show there are now 139 Iraqi doctors in Canada, compared with 85 in 2003. These figures reflect only where the doctors graduated, however. Some suspect this is an underestimate because Iraqi doctors very often train in Britain or the United States.