For four months after the birth of her first baby Tariq, Manal al-Musawi yearned to see her husband return to Iraq from his research post at an Australian cancer hospital and hold the child close, writes Hala Jaber.

Professor Kahlid al-Naib had started his job at the Peter Mac-Callum Cancer Centre in Melbourne while she was seven months pregnant, leaving her in the care of her family. She had missed him desperately.

But when he telephoned last month to surprise her with the news that he had just landed in Baghdad, her euphoria was tempered by an outbreak of fighting that prevented him from making the 25-mile journey from the mainly Shi’ite west of Baghdad to their flat in the predominantly Sunni district of Ghazaliya in the east.

“He said it was too dangerous to cross the city and he did not want to risk either of our lives,” Musawi explained. He ended the call with the words: “I will see you tomorrow. I can’t wait.”

Excitedly, Musawi started to prepare a lunch of his favourite things for the following day. Because their flat had been damaged by a bomb, she decided to serve it at her cousin’s house nearby. She dug out her video camera to film the first meeting of father and son - the first kisses, hugs and smiles.

At the same time, Musawi, 40, was acutely aware of the dangers her 43-year-old husband might face once word of his return had spread. Shortly after being invited to Melbourne, he had been sent a handwritten letter.

“Don’t come back to Iraq,” it said. “If you do, we shall cut off your head.”

The only explanation Musawi could think of was that her husband, the vice-dean of the Nahrain medical school, was a Sunni in a Shi’ite-controlled institution.

Musawi, a Shi’ite, a scientist and a university lecturer, initially begged him to stay away. But Naib, an immunologist who was popular with his students, had laughed off the threats.

“I’ve harmed no one, and I don’t believe that I’m going to get dragged into a civil war,” Naib said repeatedly.

While in Australia he had been offered a chance to teach at Mosul University in the Kurdish north of Iraq, where he felt he would be safe. But he needed to pick up some papers from his old medical school so on the morning of Thursday, March 29, he popped into his office on the way home. It was to prove a terrible mistake.

While he was chatting to friends, someone tipped off the local Shi’ite militia. As he left to see his wife and son, a car filled with Mahdi Army gunmen swooped past. He was ordered to get inside.

Across town Musawi was dreaming of their reunion when the telephone interrupted her reverie.

“I was holding our baby when our friend called to tell me the bad news. When I heard the word ‘kidnapped’, I started crying and shouting. Someone took the baby away from me,” she sobbed.

The caller, a university colleague, told her to wait by the telephone in case the kidnappers called and demanded a ransom.

“I stayed by the phone for two days. I kept on praying and crying, ‘Please God, keep him alive for me and Tariq, please God return him alive to me and Tariq’,” she said. “It was impossible for me to think that he might not be coming back.”

But the call that came on Saturday morning was from Baghdad’s main morgue, al-Tub al-Adli, where thousands of corpses dumped by death squads have been taken over the past two years.

As a prominent doctor, Naib was immediately recognised by the forensic team processing his body, which bore the wounds from five bullets fired into his head and neck.

“He never got to see his son,” Musawi said, over and over again. “He was crazy about him. He saw Tariq’s pictures on e-mail and heard him gurgle when I put him on the phone. If only he had seen his son once, my heart would feel less anguished.”

Naib’s ambition was that Tariq would eventually choose a medical career, just as he had followed his own father into the profession.

But in today’s Iraq, this choice would be fraught with risk. “They are targeting the lecturers and scientific people - they are targeting good people and for what?” Musawi asked.

The country’s academic talent is literally bleeding away. Nearly 300 academics have been murdered since 2003 and more than 2,500 have fled the country.

For the educated middle class whose liberal values are despised by the thugs on both sides of the sectarian conflict, there is little choice but to get out.

Musawi is most likely to go to Bahrain where her brother-in-law, also a professor, lives and works. As for Tariq, Musawi vowed to fulfil Naib’s wishes, see the boy through medical school and towards a career in which he can help others.

“I look at Tariq and wonder what will I tell him about his father’s death. I really don’t know what I will say when one day he asks me, ‘Where is my daddy?’”

Fifty-five people were killed and 70 wounded in a car bomb attack in Kerbala yesterday.