Iraqi expatriates play civilian roles to help train US troops for battlefield conditions

Abid Saeed, who's played everyone from a radical cleric to a police chief, may be the Al Pacino of military 'extras.'

from the November 15, 2007 edition

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Fort Bragg, N.C. - The sheikh, a charismatic figure dressed in an ankle-length dishdasha, seems intent on provoking a riot – or worse. Prostrate before an entry gate at a US military base, he shouts anti-American slogans between his chanted prayers, speaking in rapid Arabic and gesticulating madly.

He and other Iraqi villagers are enraged that one of their young men was mistakenly gunned down by nervous soldiers when their military post came under sniper fire. The mob storms the chain-link fence. Suddenly, a bomb explodes. Two protesters fall, wounded by a grenade tossed by an insurgent mixed in with the crowd. The sheikh and the mob flee. The soldiers, mercifully, hold their fire.

The staged scene at a mock forward operating post in the sand hills of North Carolina is intended to prepare US soldiers for counterinsurgency warfare before deploying to Iraq. But the exercise is made more real by role players like Abid Saeed, an energetic Iraqi expatriate who may just be the Al Pacino of military "extras."

Nicknamed "Hollywood," Mr. Saeed has been bringing flamboyant energy to parts as varied as an Iraqi police chief, village mayor, and, in this case, a radical sheikh at US military bases almost full-time since 2004. A Shiite who was part of the unsuccessful 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein in his native Basra, Saeed spent six years in an internment camp in Saudi Arabia before immigrating to the US in 1997.

He is now one of hundreds of native Arabic speakers in the US, many of them immigrants or refugees from Iraq, who have taken leading roles as battlefield thespians in readying American forces for the combat and cultural complexities of the Middle East.

"Sometimes we come to the gate and say, 'We have no food, no water, no medicine,' " says Saeed, who lives in Lexington, Ky. "I say, 'We are your neighbor, we need these things.' Sometimes the soldiers cooperate. Sometimes they say to leave, because they have shooting going on. Sometimes some of us are carrying AK-47s. But the soldiers don't know if we're friendly or if we're insurgents mixed in with the civilians and might start shooting."

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