The day-to-day news feed out of Iraq misses one of the country’s saddest, and most important, stories: the exodus of Iraq’s intellectual class.

While tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees are heading back, many professionals will never return. And they leave an enormous void — one that hurts the prospects for stability.

We’ll talk to three prominent Iraqi intellectuals who fled — about why they left, about starting over, about what they think it will take to repair Iraq, and how their country’s war looks from the outside.

This hour, On Point: Iraq’s brain drain, and Iraq’s future.

-James Hattori

Guests:

Donny George Youkhana, former director general of the Iraqi National Museum and former president of the Iraq Antiquities Board, he now teaches at Stony Brook University in New York.

Abdul Sattar Jawad, former editor of the Baghdad Mirror and former chair of the English department at Baghdad University, he is currently a visiting professor of English at Harvard University.

Saad Jawad, a longtime political science professor at Baghdad University, he is now a researcher at the University of Exeter in England.

John Akker, professor of refugee studies at London South Bank University and executive secretary of the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA).