IRAQ’S insurgency has seen horrors enough but Monday, it plumbed a new depth of depravity. Five teachers were taken by terrorists dressed in police uniforms from their Iskandariya primary school classrooms which were full of children. The teachers were lined up against a wall and shot dead in cold blood. All five were Shiites. The headmaster, reportedly a Sunni, was left unharmed by the killers.
In the terrible violence that has seized Iraq since the ill-considered US-led invasion, there has been the rationale of resisting aggression when attacks were directed against Coalition forces. Attacks against Iraqi troops or policemen could be justified as targeting “collaborators.” Even the indiscriminate carnage of the car bomb is comprehensible in terms of a vicious and relentless desire to destabilize Iraqi society. This however — the seizure and murder of teachers in front of their young pupils — defies any explanation save that the men behind this loathsome act are driven by the deepest evil.
Children are the innocent foundations upon which any country must build its future. The men and women charged with educating them do so on behalf of society. They not only teach literacy and arithmetic; they provide their pupils with an understanding of the world into which they will one day go. They teach the children to shoulder their duties and obligations as citizens. Good teachers are as precious a resource as the children they educate.
Thus there is no cause which could justify the barbarity of slaying teachers and, in so doing, traumatizing the children in their charge. Any group of people that imagines for an instant that such a terrible crime could ever be rationalized is demonstrating its total and complete moral bankruptcy.
These murders appear to be part of a rising campaign of sickening tit-for-tat violence between the largely Sunni insurgents, their Al-Qaeda backers and the Shiite community whose gunmen stalk the streets looking for Sunni victims to murder in revenge. Such killings now number some 30 a day in and around Baghdad. It is extremely foolish that Shiite hotheads have decided to respond to fire with fire because, though they clearly do not realize it, their revenge murders are doing half the terrorists’ work for them. The majority of Sunnis, still angry at their loss of position, are appalled at the violence being perpetrated in their name. At the same time, as Shiite killers murder innocent Sunnis, the Sunni community is being driven into supporting the men of violence in their midst.
Nevertheless, Sunnis must ask themselves if the kind of people who are able to slaughter five teachers in cold blood and so destroy the innocence of their pupils can in any way be said to be protectors or champions in their community. More importantly, however angry and heartbroken the local Shiites, there must be no revenge attack on a Sunni school. Murdering teachers is almost as horrific as slaying the children themselves and nothing, absolutely nothing, can ever begin to justify such acts.
