The bomb that tore through Mustansiriya University in January killed some 70 people including many female students and marked a new low in the Iraq's long struggle to build a new post-Saddam Hussein educational system.

Despite the carnage, the death count would have likely been higher if not for the endemically low attendance across southern Iraq. In December, the Iraq Students and Youth League estimated a 6 percent attendance rate at Baghdad University, stemming from the threat of violence and kidnapping to students, faculty and education ministry staff. Schools at every level in the Anbar and Diyala provinces are shut down because of deficient security.

According to tallies from international human rights groups and Iraqi officials, between 169 and 300 academics were assassinated between 2003 and 2006. Many were killed for their perceived moderate or un-Islamic views.

Tolls for primary and secondary school teachers run even higher, with at least 300 reports of teachers killed in 2006 alone.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees categorized these killing as "systematic." Abdul Jawad, a former department chair at al-Mustansiriya, went so far as to call schools the most dangerous places in Iraq.

"The campuses mainly are overruled by the fanatic students, religious animals, militias. They harass and threaten and kill. ... They don't want education," said Jawad, who recently fled Iraq after narrowly missing a bomb attack that destroyed the English-language Baghdad Mirror newspaper he founded.

The Brookings Institution and officials from the Ministry of Higher Education now estimate that 40 percent of professionals have left Iraq, depleting the country's academic infrastructure. Jawad left in October 2005, following thousands of other professors who left during post-Persian Gulf war sanctions.

Decline of the education system
Iraq's school system, once seen as a model of Arab education, has been in continuous decline after 25 years of wars and sanctions. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid for education since 2004, indicators show a precipitous drop in quality since the 2003 invasion.

"In Baghdad, parents are choosing between education and safety," said Maman Sidikou, a senior project officer for education with UNICEF, who believes the effects of sectarian violence will echo for generations through Iraq's weakened education system.

Sidikou said girls are kept home in higher numbers than boys, which could affect women's rights in the social and political life of future Iraq. For boys, the concern is greater in the short term.

"We are well aware [that] the 12 to 18 year olds, left alone, with no education, with no occupation, would go and would most probably be enlisted by the insurgent groups," Sidikou said.

Many schools are still missing the basics -- electricity, drinking water, sanitation and, Sidikou said, separate areas for girls. Teachers are missing the tools of instruction -- desks, maps, pens and paper -- and many have not received pedagogical training since the early 1980s.

Rebuilding schools
In 2003, the World Bank said 80 percent of Iraq's 15,000 schools were in need of repair.

As of late 2006, about one-third had been rebuilt, short of the original goals laid out by the Iraq Reconstruction and Relief Fund.

And rebuilt schools become targets for bombing and looting. The United Nations recently reported that rockets hit five of their rehabilitated schools and that unknown gunmen kidnapped five primary school teachers.

Sidikou says timelines for school rehabilitation have stretched from three months to nine months as violence continues to impede work and as inflation makes it more costly. A school that cost $45,000 to build two years ago, now costs $90,000, according to the UN Human Settlements Program.

He laments the lack of consistent international support and the end of USAID contracts in 2006 that were instrumental in reintroducing students to the education system, and keeping them out of harm's way.

UNICEF now says 4,000 schools are in need of reconstruction and 2,000 in need of rehabilitation.

"We have to think of alternative ways to just take care of business. ... Children cannot afford to wait for a better time to come [to school]," he said.

Higher education
Higher education woes have paralleled those of the primary and secondary schools. A 2005 UN report found that more than 80 percent of higher education buildings had been at best robbed and at worst destroyed.

Tahir Albakaa, former president of the recently bombed al-Mustansiriya, was forced to close graduate university programs because of the destruction of lab space and libraries as well as the unavailability of professors.

Funds once allocated by the Iraqi government to university rebuilding were marked for security efforts as insurgent violence escalated, further hindering the recovery of the higher education system.

But in March, a group including Barham Salah, a deputy prime minister in Iraq, is planning to break ground on an American University of Iraq, where Arab students would have the chance to learn about democracy, Western philosophy and compromise.

"I think that's a good goal," said Albakaa, who, as the former minister of higher education, had sought ways to introduce foreign education into Iraq while retaining its countrymen.

"The main goal is to create a league that will hopefully be the leaders of Iraq. And we think that that cannot be created by keeping on doing the same," said Azzam Alwash, the executive secretary of the university's board of trustees.

The university would be built in Sulamaniya, in Iraqi Kurdistan, far from the violence of Baghdad and Iraq's south.

The safety appeals to professors like Jawad, now teaching as a visiting lecturer at Duke, who is determined to return to Iraq and who says he's been approached to teach at the American University.

"I want to serve my country and students, actually. I pray to go back to my school and my students," Jawad said.

-- By Adnaan Wasey, Online NewsHour