Students wonder if the universities will survive the year or fall a victim to Iraq’s burgeoning religious conflict. Many women come to school dressed in head scarves, terrified that criminals will abduct them on the way.

A veneer of civility exists as men and women fraternise; Shia and Sunnis mix, but it is all superficial. Campus life now mirrors the chaos on the streets of Baghdad.

Amel Amad Adin, 21, a third-year biology student, says that she has watched Baghdad University, the biggest in the country, fall apart during her academic career. In the past year three of Adin’s professors have been murdered, including the head of her department, while another five have left Iraq. “We’ve heard of instances where professors had to give passing marks to certain students just because they belonged to certain parties or militias,” she said.

The situation is so bad that her family is pressuring her to leave. Twelve of her twenty-five classmates have dropped out. She is afraid of travelling to school and describes how minibuses carrying students have been attacked by gunmen.

“Something might happen at any second that could prevent us from attending school and stop our studies. Tuesday’s incident was a warning sign that this whole system might collapse at any second and we will lose everything.”

About 80 hostages are still being held from the mass kidnapping. Some were murdered while another 70, who were freed, claim to have been beaten, the Higher Education Minister told reporters yesterday.

A Shia lecturer at Mustansiriyah university in Baghdad told The Times that the attack had specifically targeted the office responsible for awarding overseas study scholarships to state employees because the department awarded more fellowships to Sunnis than Shias.

The Mahdi Army, a Shia militia supporting the anti-Western cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, is believed to have carried out the attack.

Since 2003 at least 160 professors have been killed, more than 2,000 have fled abroad, hundreds of students have died and thousands have dropped out, while 7,500 have changed campuses because of the sectarian violence, the Higher Education Ministry spokesman Basil al-Khateeb told The Times.

Mahmoud Abdul Illah, 20, a film student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad, says that classes are cancelled because of murder. “Professors are obvious targets, especially at our school because extremists consider it unlawful to study film and art. They consider it haram [wrong]. We had one of our best professors, a famous film director named Hadi Oumran, killed last June. We could have learnt a lot from him.”

The Mustansiriyah lecturer lamented the sectarianism sweeping the halls of learning. “People have begun to forget they are human beings. They are turning into monsters.”

She says that she used to love teaching her students, but in 2005, after the Shia religious parties took over the Government, her campus fell to the tide of Islamic fundamentalism.

The Mahdi Army overran the university, took over the student union and began to dominate campus life. Where American pop songs once blared on loudspeakers, now only Islamic prayers are heard. The campus has formally banned Western music.

“They’ve turned the campus into a Shia mosque,” said the teacher, a devout Muslim who asked not to be identified.

During important religious festivals such as Ashura, which commemorates a revered Shia figure, the al-Sadr loyalists draped the campus buildings in black. In turn, the campus’s smaller Sunni population grew angry at such displays. A bloody feud developed.

Students who supported Hojatoleslam al-Sadr started to follow Sunni classmates home, the teacher said. One Sadrist follower boasted to her that the movement was protecting the university. “The student told me, anyone we suspect of having political activities we follow home. Then we kidnap him to Sadr City to question him. We have courts in Sadr City, where we’ll try him and get a verdict.” She said she had little doubt that many of the verdicts ended in death.

Even teachers have fallen into the crossfire of the students’ religious wars and have started to give militia members passing grades in order to save their lives, she said. “It’s easy for a student to follow a teacher and kill him. Nobody can protect you. Even the university president is afraid of the students.”

Last June a Shia psychology professor was shot dead leaving the school’s main gate. A few days later a Sunni professor in Arabic studies was gunned down in his car. “It was completely tit-for-tat and the college of arts lost two professors.”

The university is a shadow of its former self. Some classes have counted only three students so far this autumn and some first-year students will not begin their autumn semester until December. The teacher wants to escape Iraq, as many of her colleagues have done.

• The Iraqi Government issued an arrest warrant last night for the country’s most prominent Sunni cleric, Harith al-Dari, the head of the Muslim Clerics’ Association. Jawad al-Bolani, the Interior Minister, said that he was accused of “supporting terrorism”. Shia leaders have complained that Mr al-Dari had appeared to justify violence by al -Qaeda. The cleric is believed to be out of Iraq. (Reuters)

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