BAGHDAD – The Iraqi government is trying to entice back hundreds of doctors who fled the country because of rampant violence and says improved security is already leading some to return.

Rasheed al-Nassiri, head of the government's 'Committee to Protect Doctors', said more than 400 Iraqi doctors had come back this year, encouraged by a drop in violence and better wages.

'Migration has stopped and now we are working hard to encourage migration in the opposite direction,' Nassiri told a conference held in Baghdad this week to look at how to encourage doctors to return to the war-torn country.

Doctors and other professionals fled in their hundreds during the explosion of violence in the years following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, triggering an enormous brain drain.

But much attention has focused on doctors given that they were targeted because of their profession. Once the elite of Iraqi society, doctors were attacked by militants seeking to create a climate of fear and kidnappers demanding rich ransoms.

The official Iraqi Doctors' Syndicate said last December that 60 to 70 percent of 2,327 registered medical specialists with 15 to 20 years' experience had left Iraq. The syndicate said it had no new figures for how many doctors have returned.

Nassiri told the conference that around 176 doctors had been killed in the past five years, but the security situation is now much improved, with violence at a four-year low in May.

The conference called for protected residential compounds to be built for doctors at hospitals to keep them safe, said laws against assaults on doctors should be enforced and proposed that doctors be allowed to carry weapons.

GOVERNMENT LISTENING

In a message read to the meeting, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said the government was 'ready to address all the results of this conference'.

Aakif al-Alusi, a pathologist who fled Iraq at the height of the sectarian violence in late 2006 after receiving a death threat, said doctors still faced security problems in Iraq.

Alusi has settled in Bahrain but the syndicate invited him to the conference, hoping it would convince him to come back.

'The security is much better but the doctors still get threats from criminal gangs. It is still difficult to press charges in the police station and say 'I am being threatened or I am being followed by a car',' Alusi said.

'There is a problem of individual security since the doctor is a prominent figure in society ... My sons want to return, their future is here. If God wills, we will return,' he said.

Abu Farah, an oculist at Baghdad's Ibn al-Haitham eye hospital, said doctors' salaries were raised last year and would be increased further this year.

'With these salaries and the improving security situation, I think it's encouraging,' Abu Farah said.

Iraqi doctors' pay remains low by international standards.

A recently qualified doctor in Iraq makes about $650 a month, while a specialist can earn more than $2,000 a month, depending on experience and expertise, Abu Farah said.

In Britain, for example, family doctors earn on average more than $17,000 a month.

The head of the doctors' syndicate, Nadhim Abdul-Hameed Qassim, who attended the conference, said the state should guarantee good security, economic and social standards to encourage doctors to return.

'We will say to the state that we did not leave Iraq and we are helping the people in Iraq, so help us to protect the Iraqi doctor,' he said.

(Editing by Adrian Croft and Samia Nakhoul)