Heather Hughes
As a pediatrician, Ibrahim Shaeer Jabbar Al-Jumaili had dedicated his life to children. On July 22, 2011, the professor of medicine at Kirkuk University in Iraq was murdered while resisting a kidnapping attempt. He was 55.
Al-Jumaili was one of hundreds of Iraqi academics assassinated between 2003-13. And given that not a single person has been charged in those murders, his name was destined to slip into the bloody history of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.
But thanks to a collaboration founded in the wake of bombing that devastated one of Baghdad’s most important cultural institutions, artists and activists are working to ensure the victims are seen as “people, teachers, members of a family, part of a university,” said Beau Beausoleil, whose “Shadow & Light” project the exhibition is drawn from.