自從伊戰以后，伊拉克的安全形勢日益好轉，雖然恐怖襲擊依然時候發生，但是社會秩序總體趨好。于是，在安全得以保證的情況下，發展就顯得越來越重要。伊拉克政府不惜巨額花費資助國內優秀的年輕人前往西方發達國家學習，以期早日歸來報效祖國。但是國內與國外的巨大差異使人才流失成了伊拉克政府的心頭大患。

聽力文本:

Snowy Sulaimaniya in the Iraq's northern Kurdish region. The city seems a million miles from Baghdad. And it is. Iraqi Kurdistan is stable, self-ruling and economically vibrant.

At Sulaimaniya's recently-established American University, the first generation of MBA students are graduating. Many of them say they want to put their skills to work building up private enterprise in Iraq.

"This is a big responsibility for all of us, to stay in Iraq, to get educated and to give our share to, back to the community and back to the country."

Easier said up here than from Baghdad. The latest unemployment figures for Iraq are between 23% and 38%. Suffice to say, jobs are scarce and with no guarantee of security, there's little to encourage young graduates to stay.

"It's not just being within the last seven years that Iraq's young and talented had left this country. This is a problem that stems right back to the beginnings of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party. It was compounded by sanctions and the war and the subsequant violence have simply made it worse."

Ahmed and Umniah have both just been accepted onto a government scholarship program which will pay for their tuition and expenses at universities abroad. Umniah is going to Britain to study computer sciences.

"I don't feel like we had a real education here. So that's another reason why I want to study outside. I want to see how real education is."

Five thousand students supplied. Five hundred made it through at the cost of the government's a fifty million dollars. The government plans in future to provide scholarships for five years to study abroad for ten thousand students.

"When I introduce this proposal to the prime minister, this is the first question he asked me. How can you guarantee that those students will come back? And I said, really I can not guarantee you."

Ahmed believes it's in the Iraq's nature to want to come home. He says many already have.

"Iraqis are not like maybe foreign countries. They are ours by nature. They are Muslim. So a lot of them, they have this connections among their families. They are strong connection. So they don't leave for good."

The government has to hope so. There's not just a lot of money riding on this project. These young faces are Iraq's future, the human capital it needs to repair decades of trauma.

生詞匯總：

kurdish: 庫爾德人的 Kurdistan: 庫爾德斯坦(西南亞,庫爾德人分布地區的習慣名稱)

suffice: 固定句型 suffice (it) to say (that)...的意思是used to suggest that although you could say more, what you do say will be enough to explain what you mean 無須多說；只需說...就夠了

Ba'ath Party: 復興黨，全名為阿拉伯社會主義復興黨，或譯阿拉伯復興社會黨，成立于1947年，是一個激進的、非宗教的民族主義政黨。