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Iraqi schools, once renowned, still reeling from war
Security has improved across Iraq, and along with it attention to an education system battered by decades of deprivation, and, since US forces took over in 2003, attacks by Islamist militants intent on disrupting daily life.
Higher salaries are designed to keep the best teachers in the country, or entice return from exile. Budgets have increased, and the US embassy is providing teacher-training programs and other aid for which educators here say they are grateful.
But teachers say vast uncertainties remain in a system once renowned for producing top professionals, from doctors to engineers. Iraqi statistics count 31,598 violent attacks against educational institutions in the first five years of US occupation. During the peak of sectarian killing from 2005 to 2007, some 340 university professors and 446 students were killed by insurgents and militiamen.
The result has been a degradation of Iraq's fragile social texture, which teachers say is reflected in a drop in some students' willingness to learn and increased criminality. "Again we feel it is a bit peaceful [now], but underneath, no, there is something fundamental" that has changed, says one English professor who asked not to be named, and who has received death threats.