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Iraq

Recruits for Iraqi army in Ramadi? 31

By wire services
Published March 29, 2006

RAMADI, Iraq - Beyond the army recruiting center's maze of blast walls and barbed wire, a roadside bomb targeted an Iraqi Humvee. From a rooftop across the street, a gunman popped up and took aim, drawing a brief hail of return fire.

In the building next door, a mortar round crashed through the roof.

Nobody ever said recruiting for the Iraqi army would be easy. And by the end of the first army recruiting drive in this insurgent-infested city Monday, just 31 young men had stepped through the door to join up.

The low turnout highlights the difficulty of filling the army's ranks in Ramadi, where Sunni residents both distrust the Shiite-dominated Iraqi military already deployed here and fear joining up will mark them as insurgent targets.

"For a place like Ramadi, we're doing well to have any recruits at all," said U.S. Marine Capt. Selden Hale, a recruiting adviser. "But it's a start, and it's progress, whether it's one (recruit) or 1,000."

Thousands of Iraqi soldiers are serving in Ramadi and its environs, conducting patrols with U.S. forces and operating independently in some parts of town. But the battalions are made up mostly of Shiites from Baghdad or south of it, U.S. military officials said. Ramadi is dominated by Sunnis.

Shiite Iraqi soldiers deployed at the recruiting center, an abandoned glass factory, said Ramadi was a tough place to work.

"The people of Ramadi never liked us," said Sgt. Maj. Ahmed Mohamed, an Iraqi soldier who hails from a southern Shiite town. "They need their sons in the security forces here. They need people around who are from their same tribe."

Aware of the issue and keen to spread the word, U.S. officials said some 400 "invitation cards" to join the army were sent out for distribution to tribal sheiks, government officials and Iraqi army units. Nobody showed up with the cards.

Turnout for the one-day event may have been hurt because word of mouth didn't spread far. Authorities did not want to announce the date they would be receiving candidates, for good reason - insurgents for years have been targeting recruiting centers for both the police and army.

On Monday a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest struck an army recruiting center to the northeast near Tal Afar, killing at least 40 people and wounding 30.

In Ramadi on Jan. 5, a suicide bomber stepped into line during a recruiting drive for police at the glass factory, killing more than 50 people and wounding at least 60 more. U.S. soldiers said some recruits - desperate for work - actually stepped over body parts to get back in line.

"I don't care if it's risky or not, I need to support my family," said one of the army candidates, 33-year-old Abdulrahman Farhan Ahmed.

Others said they wanted to get both U.S. troops and insurgents out of the city. They want Iraq troops here, they said, but they don't trust the Iraqi units they see.

"It's difficult to deal with them or ask them for help because they are strangers. We don't know them," said 26-year old Adnan Abass. "We want the soldiers here to be from Ramadi city, from our own tribes. Maybe then, Ramadi will be peaceful."

Maybe.

Suspicion runs both ways.

"I wouldn't trust any of these guys," said Mohamed, a Shiite, gesturing toward the line of half a dozen Sunni recruits among the 31 allowed to enter.

Two people who stopped by were suspected of trying to gather intelligence for insurgents. Both were detained, blindfolded, questioned and released.

Monday's would-be recruits were screened by U.S. officials and given literacy tests. American soldiers took down their identities and conducted iris scans to determine whether they had been detained before. They were to be sent east to Habbaniyah for a five-week training course, where they would be screened again by Iraqi authorities.

U.S. officials say the Iraqi army numbers 111,000-strong, and is expected to reach full-strength of 130,000 next year. Only when they are fully trained and ready, though, will American troops be able to go home. That could easily take years.

BUSH'S PREFERENCE: Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador, has told Shiite officials that President Bush does not want the Iraqi prime minister to remain the country's leader in the next government, irritated Shiite politicians said Tuesday. Haider al-Ubady, a spokesman for Ibrahim al-Jaafari, accused the Americans of trying to subvert Iraqi sovereignty. "How can they do this?" Ubady said. "An ambassador telling a sovereign country what to do is unacceptable."

RAID CONTROVERSY: Defense officials displayed photographs Tuesday of grenade launchers and bombmaking materials that they said were captured during a raid Sunday that has become a bitter point between U.S. and Iraqi officials. The briefing by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was intended to counter angry Shiite claims that U.S.-backed Iraqi commandos massacred at least 16 worshipers at a Baghdad mosque. "The people we're up against are vicious, and they lie," Rumsfeld said. Shiite leaders ended their one-day boycott of talks on forming a government.

ARAB LEAGUE SUMMIT: Concerns over growing Iranian influence in Iraq, and the lack of Arab involvement there, dominated the opening of the annual Arab League summit conference in Khartoum, Sudan, on Tuesday. "Any solution for the Iraqi problem cannot be reached without Arabs and Arab participation," Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, said in his opening speech. In a draft resolution likely to be approved today, the group's 22 Arab nations agreed to reopen diplomatic missions in Iraq.

VIOLENCE: Police discovered 17 more corpses, all men from Baghdad who were handcuffed and shot in the head. Dozens of other Iraqis were wounded and at least seven killed in drive-by shootings and car and roadside bombings Tuesday. Also, three groups of gunmen kidnapped at least 24 Iraqis working at a currency exchange and two electronics stores in Baghdad, the interior ministry said.

Sources: New York Times, Knight Ridder Newspapers, Associated Press

[Last modified March 29, 2006, 01:25:05]