Mindy0301bAs soon as the school day was over in northern Iraq on Thursday, high school students at the Classical School of the Medes began switching out their profile photos on Facebook. The Iraqis replaced them with photos of their American teacher, Jeremiah Small, who was killed Thursday when an Iraqi student pulled a gun and shot him during class. The student then shot himself and died on the way to the hospital.

“There was an argument between the student and his American teacher … and as a result of that argument the student shot dead his teacher using a pistol he had, and then shot himself,” provincial Gov. Zana Mohammad Salih said shortly after the incident.

Eyewitnesses disputed whether an argument preceded the shooting. In an article titled “The Loss of a Hero” and published on a Kurdish news site, senior students at the school wrote, “Quite contrary to what the public media has claimed, he wasn’t killed because of a religious dispute.”

Just after the shooting, students could be seen streaming from the school, crying and talking on cell phones, as classes were abruptly cancelled. The K-12 private institution has over 500 students and is one of three schools in Iraq’s northern region of Kurdistan underwritten by Nashville-based Servant Group International.

The school opened in 2000 and had about 75 students enrolled at the time of the 2003 U.S. invasion. Sulaymaniyah, a city that has grown to about 700,000 people, became a refuge for dislocated Iraqis from Baghdad and other hotspots during the eight-year war. Located 160 miles northeast of Baghdad, it largely escaped the notable violence and attacks by Islamic militants that have plagued the rest of the country. Locals said the shooting shocked them, and eyewitnesses described a scene of chaos in the classroom, the Associated Press reported, with some students fainting in fear after gunfire shattered the morning class.

Small, 33, had been teaching English and history at the school in Sulaymaniyah since 2005. … COMPLETE STORY >>

Read Mindy Belz’s complete Web Extra report.