Former Iraqi soldiers demand pay

They came with stones, hundreds of former Iraqi servicemen, and descended on the Central Bank in the southern city of Basra Tuesday, demanding that the US-led coalition fulfill its promise to pay monthly stipends, reports The Associated Press.

They pelted the building's exterior and then turned on Iraqi policemen, who responded first with battons, then with open fire. Hospital officials said one ex-soldier was killed and three others were wounded. A coalition spokesman said he had no more information about the incident or the stipend agreement.

The protest happened the same day 705 Iraqi soldiers graduated in a "colorful" ceremony, CNN reports. This second battalion of a reconstituted Iraqi army to finish training in two months is the core of a 40,000-strong force officials hope to field by September.

When the Coalition Authority disbanded Iraq's military in May, more than 250,000 ex-soldiers were left destitute, AP reports. A few weeks later, in June, US forces killed two demonstrators during a protest over pay; authorities soon agreed to pay monthly stipends of $50 to $150 to former Iraqi Army rank-and-file troops in the hopes of preventing future uprisings.

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On Monday, meanwhile, some 100 former officers and lower ranks, many dressed in tattered and shabby clothing, rallied outside the Baghdad headquarters of the coalition authorities to vent anger about lack of support from Iraq's new leadership, according to Agence France-Presse. "They should pay us," ex-first lieutenant Hassan Kader Kazae told the AFP. "It is their job. They take our oil, so they must give us our money."

After a "spirited" debate Monday in the chamber of Iraq's transitional Governing Council, members voted 11-7 in favor of keeping Jan. 6 Army Day a state holiday, according to The San Francisco Chronicle. While former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was in power, the day was celebrated with "garish" military parades and pay bonuses for soldiers. Chronicle correspondent Borzou Daragahi reports:

Founded Jan. 6, 1921, Iraq's army grew to become the world's fourth largest. Under Hussein, it became an integral part of the government's wide-ranging security apparatus. Conscripts were used to quell protests and anti-government uprisings. Most infamously, the army sprayed chemical weapons on Iranian soldiers during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war and Kurdish villagers in Halabja in 1988. It suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of the US-led coalition in 1991, following the invasion and occupation of Kuwait, and continued to sully its image with the violent suppression of a Shiite uprising in the early 1990s.

US civil administrator Paul Bremer's decision to disband the army in June, Mr. Daragahi adds, put hundreds of thousands of Iraqi military men out of work in an instant, and the ranks of the antioccupation insurgency swelled.

Just as US commanders in Iraq are "racing to recruit and train" a significant local security force that includes police, security guards, and soldiers, they are giving less attention to basic procedures such as background checks and training, according to a Washington Post editorial:

The result, so far, has been a force poorly prepared to substitute for US troops in combating the ongoing insurgency in central Iraq - or even for policing Iraqi cities and towns. The trouble will be compounded if US officials step back from the job of dismantling existing Iraqi militias based on party or ethnic group. At worst, the strategy will make it impossible to safely disengage American forces from the role of primary guarantors of security, while inviting civil war.

In June, just days after the US-led coalition promised to issue stipends and severance payments to the newly unemployed soldiers, former Iraqi colonel Blund Hassib told The Christian Science Monitor that he and his twin brother had "a great desire" to return to the army, even though ranks of colonel and higher are excluded from the new force.

Many unemployed officers and soldiers threatened to fight American forces, even before protests turned violent, and Mr. Hassib felt ashamed - as well as concerned - that his fellow officers were behaving unprofessionally.

"The Iraqi soldier's mind was brainwashed from the beginning," he said, estimating that 75 percent of Iraq's former officers think "negatively" about the US occupation. "Until now," he cautioned, "no one has given these [former] soldiers any future, or told them what the new Army will be like."

Also...
• Army's 'stop loss' order extended ( Fox News)
• What We Will Do in 2004 ( The New York Times)
• 21 days in Baghdad/ ( Time magazine)
• US sees tide turn on Iraq insurgents ( The Christian Science Monitor)

• Feedback appreciated. E-mail Elizabeth Armstrong .