Higher salaries for Iraqi professionals

  Under Saddam Hussein around four million people are thought to have left Iraq, among them some of the country's most qualified professionals.Just after the war some exiles did return but more than two years on the country's brain drain, far from being reversed, is continuing, at a rate that's alarming many Iraqis.

University teachers will now see their salaries doubled to try to keep them in the country but the problem isn't confined to the campus. Doctors are fleeing too with worrying consequences for a health service already struggling with shortages of equipment and with the number of casualties they're treating.

Iraq's medical union believes that over the past two years around three hundred doctors have either been kidnapped or had a member of their family abducted for ransom. Others have received death threats and dozens of university professors have also been killed. A senior government official told the BBC he believed Iraqi professionals were being systematically targeted.

Vocabulary:
 
exiles: people who have left or been forced to leave their country, especially for political reasons

brain drain: a movement of large numbers of highly-skilled or professional people from the country where they were trained to another country where they can earn more money

reversed: put back to the way it was before

confined to: restricted to

fleeing: escaping; going away

casualties: people hurt or killed in an accident or a battle

abducted: taken away by force; kidnapped

ransom: a sum of money paid to free a person being held illegally

targeted: identified somebody as an object of an attack

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