BAGHDAD, Dec 11: Hundreds of recruits to the new Iraqi army Washington is building to replace Saddam Hussein’s forces have quit, complaining of bad pay and work conditions, Iraq’s US-led civil administration said on Thursday.
Iraq’s US governor Paul Bremer abolished the 400,000-strong Iraqi army in May, and the United States is recruiting and training an army it envisions as a force of about 40,000, along with larger numbers of police and border guards.
The US administration — facing domestic pressure over rising troop casualties as it mounts its campaign for the presidential elections — has accelerated those plans as it prepares to hand power to an Iraqi government by June.
“There are about 300 individuals out of a total of about 700 in the First Battalion of the Iraqi army who have effectively resigned,” the official told reporters in Baghdad.
“Their complaint appears to have been about terms and conditions and salary. We will look at these, review the terms and conditions,” he said, while pointing out salaries for enlisted men in the force were higher than under Saddam Hussein.
Privates in the army are being paid about 60 dollars and lieutenant colonels and other more senior officers around 150 dollars.
Persistent attacks on US and allied troops, international organizations in Iraq and Iraqi civilians have led US officials to acknowledge that abolishing the army decision may have been a mistake, and to agree to a new security force composed of various Iraqi militias.
PREVENTABLE DEATHS: Misguided military tactics by US-led forces in Iraq resulted in hundreds of preventable civilian deaths, Human Rights Watch has said in a report.
The New York-based rights group specifically cited the use of cluster bombs and the US “decapitation” strategy — targeted strikes on top Iraqi leaders — as two major causes of unnecessary civilian fatalities.
“Coalition forces generally tried to avoid killing Iraqis who weren’t taking part in combat,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “But the deaths of hundreds of civilians still could have been prevented.”
The 147-page report, titled “Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq”, said more than 1,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed or wounded by the British and US use of nearly 13,000 cluster munitions, containing nearly two million sub-munitions.
In a single day, the report said, US cluster-munition attacks in the southern Iraqi city of Hilla killed at least 33 civilians and injured 109.
A hospital director in Hilla told Human Rights Watch that cluster munitions caused 90 per cent of the civilian injuries that his hospital treated during the invasion. Hospital records from Hilla, Najaf and Nassiriya recorded 2,279 civilian casualties in March and April, including 678 dead and 1,601 injured.—Reuters/AFP
