Iraq's public-sector employees get a salary boost

They mean that years after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, "the government is beginning to take root and establish itself," he said. A nationwide increase in public-sector salaries took effect at the end of June for civil servants, from rookies to department heads at public hospitals. The lowest-paid civil servants, who earned $100 a month, now receive at least an extra $16 or so.

The new scale includes extra pay for seniority and dependents, and especially for education level. Those who hold a bachelor's degree get a 50% increase in salary, those with master's get 75% more, and the salaries of those with doctorates have doubled.

All told, the government will spend an additional $1.8 billion annually on salaries for its employees, all of it from oil revenues, said Ala Abdullah, a member of the parliament's finance committee. The pay increases are among the first major benefits from post-invasion oil profits, though it comes years later than the Bush administration expected.

Months of diminished violence have allowed Iraq's battered oil industry to return to its prewar production level of 2.5 million barrels a day. (Before Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the international sanctions that followed, the country was producing almost 4.5 million barrels a day.)

The resurgent production combined with record oil prices adds up to a massive windfall, part of which is being passed on to civil servants.

"This will create more confidence in the government," Abdullah said. "It's an indication of stability."

It's also a plea aimed at the thousands of Iraqi professionals who fled the country. The message: Things are getting better. Come home.

"This is one of the reasons [for the salary increase] -- to lure some of them back," Abdullah said.

Five years of insurgency and lawlessness after the ouster of Saddam Hussein took a heavy toll on Iraq's most educated. University professors and doctors were targeted for assassination by insurgents and for kidnapping by ransom-seeking gangs.

The result was a brain drain among those whose skills would be most needed to help rebuild the country.

Bassem, the architecture professor, said his father-in-law, a well-known orthopedic surgeon, was kidnapped and freed for ransom in 2004. Bassem estimated that Iraq has lost as many as 40% of its physicians, university professors and PhDs since 2003.

Those who stayed found themselves leading double lives. Their education and employment, once a source of respect and social status, had become a bull's-eye.

For years, Bassem told any stranger who asked that he was a merchant. A colleague, Haidar Assad, a professor of interior design, still keeps his Baghdad University parking sticker in his pocket rather than on his windshield.

Assad says it will take more than higher salaries to lure back the professionals who fled Iraq.

"It's not just money. It's money and safety and services and other things."

Even though the money may be coming and security has slowly been improving, Assad said services and infrastructure are still in tatters.

Electricity, when it's present in his home for a few hours a day, is "treated like an honored guest," Assad said.

The salary boost, and the increased stability it implies, might be enough to coax back maybe half the professionals who left, Bassem said. But it won't be easy.