Mercenary Boom in Iraq
By Aaron Glantz, CorpWatch.org, March 23, 2004. Photo: Cartoonist:
Khalil
Bendib
Kirkuk, Iraq -- Mamand Kesnazani reclines in his high-backed
leather chair
and puts his feet on top of his desk inside the main security
gate of
Iraq's northern oil field. The former fighter for Jalal Talabani's
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Kesnazani came to Kirkuk
the same day
as the American Army last April. He's been guarding the oil
field ever
since. "I've had a lot of bosses this year," Kesnazani
says as he orders a
round of dark Iraqi tea. "First it was the PUK, then the
US Army came with
Kellogg, Brown and Root. That's Dick Cheney's company,"
he says smiling.
"Now the company has changed again to a British company
called Erinys."
Kesnazani is a peshmerga -- which means "ready to die"
-- a name that has
become the accepted name for the Kurdish fighters in northern
Iraq who
battled Saddam Hussein's army for decades. Security jobs like
those at
Northern Oil are technically open to all Iraqis, but those staffing
this
checkpoint estimate 95% are peshmerga.
Kesnazani has not even bothered to change his uniform. He still
wears the
checkered black and white headscarf and sharwal (baggy pants)
typical of
peshmerga fighters, but most of his cohorts are clad in the
smart blue and
gold uniform of Erinys Iraq. They look every bit the part of
private
security guards.
These men are on the frontline of the burgeoning security business
in
Iraq, easily the fastest growing business sector in the country
because of
the growing sophistication and effectiveness of the insurgency.
The
majority of the jobs go to Kurds because of their unswerving
hatred of
Saddam over the years, or to mercenaries from other countries
like Britain
to South Africa, who are neutral players in what some see as
a growing
civil war. This boom may be heightening ethnic tensions in Iraq
while
causing a recruitment strain on security forces in other countries.
Favoritism Towards Kurds?
Four o'clock in the evening in Kirkuk and two dozen American
soldiers are
doing their part to secure the city. The US military is performing
a
regular search of the local offices of the Kurdistan Community
Party. A
dozen American soldiers with machine guns and body armor are
searching the
building, while another dozen station themselves outside --
some allowing
Iraqi children to play with their automatic weapons. The commanding
officer Lt. John Frazee says his troops found five Kalashnikovs
-- the
self-defense limit set by American authorities.
Who's Behind Erinys?
Erinys $80-million contract, awarded by the occupation authorities
last
summer to provide security for Iraq's vital oil infrastructure,
has become
a controversial lightning rod within the Iraqi Provisional Government
and
the security industry, according to Pulitzer-prize winning journalist
Knut
Royce of New York Newsday.
Soon after this security contract was issued, the company started
recruiting many of its guards from the ranks of Ahmed Chalabi's
former
militia, the Free Iraqi Forces, raising allegations from other
Iraqi
officials that he was creating a private army.
Chalabi, 59, scion of one of Iraq's most politically powerful
and wealthy
families until the monarchy was toppled in 1958, had been living
in exile
in London when the U.S. invaded Iraq. The chief architect of
the umbrella
organization for the resistance, the Iraqi National Congress
(INC),
Chalabi is viewed by many Iraqis as America's hand-picked choice
to rule
Iraq.
The security contract technically was awarded to Erinys Iraq,
a security
company also newly formed after the invasion, but bankrolled
at its
inception by Nour USA, which was incorporated in the United
States last
May, according to David Braus, the company's managing director.
Nour's
founder was a Chalabi friend and business associate, Abul Huda
Farouki.
Within days of the award last August, Nour became a joint venture
partner
with Erinys and the contract was amended to include Nour.
An industry source familiar with some of the internal affairs
of both
companies said Chalabi received a $2-million fee for helping
arrange the
contract. Chalabi, in a brief interview with Newsday, denied
that claim,
as did a top company official. Chalabi also denied that he has
had
anything to do with the security firm.
Yet the INC is deeply connected to Erinys. For example founding
partner
and director of Erinys Iraq is Faisal Daghistani, the son of
Tamara
Daghistani, for years one of Chalabi's most trusted confidants.
She was a
key player in the creation of the INC which received millions
of dollars
in U.S. funds to help destabilize the Saddam Hussein regime
before the
U.S. invasion last year.
And Farouki's businesses received at least $12 million in the
1980s from a
Chalabi-controlled bank in Washington, D.C. The Jordanian government
says
that bank was part of a massive embezzlement scheme perpetrated
by Chalabi
on the Petra bank he owned in Amman. When the bank collapsed
in 1989, it
cost the Jordanian government $200 million to reimburse depositors
and
avert a collapse of the country's entire banking system.
Jordanian authorities have complained that much of the funds
they claim
were siphoned off the Amman bank ended up at Petra International.
By May
1989, three months before Jordan seized Petra Bank, the bankrupt
Farouki
companies owed Petra International more than $12 million, court
records
show. A separate contract for $327 million with Nour was cancelled
for the
appearance of conflict of interest. He says he generally finds
Kurdish
groups comply with instructions from American soldiers. "This
area is
better than Baghdad because it is Kurdish," he says. "Kurds
are less
likely to make trouble. They're less likely to be terrorists."
Across town, in a primarily Shi'ite slum, a group of unemployed
middle-aged men while away the afternoon drinking tea. Most
were soldiers
under Saddam Hussein. "I went to the Coalition (the occupation
authorities) to apply for a job in security," says 43-year-old
Ibrahim
al-Jaboori. "I've been a soldier my whole life and I'm
100% against these
terrorists. But they said there are no jobs. Then I see everyone
providing
security is Kurdish."
Two doors down is Ali Adnan Adwan's fruit stand. The 25-year-old
Shi'ite
graduated law school a few months before the March 2003 invasion,
but with
limited telephone service and intermittent electricity, he found
it hard
to run a law practice. So he started a fruit stand. "The
people who don't
have jobs will go to anyone with money and explode themselves."
He cites a
story a taxi driver told him that there are people willing to
pay $250,000
to potential suicide bombers. "So their family and their
grandchildren
will be able to live well in the future."
Adwan says that he has heard that George Bush got $87 billion
extra from
American taxpayers to spend in Iraq but as far as he can tell,
most of
this money has gone to foreigners and Kurds. He suggests if
some of that
went to people like him there would be fewer bombings.
Magnet for Mercenaries
The top wage for rank and file Kurdish guards who guard the
oil fields is
$120 a month, hardly a living wage but better than nothing in
a country
which has an estimated 75% rate of unemployment. By comparison
their
supervisors, many of whom are South African, are estimated to
earn an
average salary of $5,000 a month. "They said they had to
teach us how to
fight," says one guard speaking on condition of anonymity,
"They taught us
hand-to-hand fighting and how to use more advanced weapons than
just the
Kalashnikov." Like most peshmerga on duty, this one doesn't
approve of the
methods taught by Erinys. "We already knew how to fight,"
he says.
"Saddam's regime taught us how to fight in his army and
the peshmerga
taught us how to fight Saddam Hussein. Then KBR taught us how
to fight for
the Americans." Kesnazani calls the South Africans' methods
"a bit
strange."
The South African trainers came under scrutiny on January 28,
when Erinys
trainer Francois Strydom was killed and his colleague Deon Gouws
seriously
injured as a bomb exploded in their hotel in Baghdad. The two
men, in
addition to being Erinys, trainers turned out to be members
of South
Africa's secret police in the 1980s under the Apartheid regime.
Strydom
was a member of Koevoet, a notoriously brutal counterinsurgency
arm of the
South African military that operated in Namibia during the neighboring
state's fight for independence in the 1980s.
Gouws is a former officer of the Vlakplaas, a secret police
unit in South
Africa. According to South Africa's Sunday Times, Gouws received
amnesty
application from the Truth And Reconciliation Commission after
admitting
to between 40 and 60 petrol bombings of political activists'
houses in
Mamelodi, Atteridgeville, Soshanguve, Oukasie, Pietersburg,
Tembisa and
Ekangala in 1986, a car bombing in 1986 that claimed the life
of
KwaNdebele homeland Cabinet minister and ANC activist Piet Ntuli
and an
arson attack on the home of Mamelodi doctor Fabian Ribiero in
March 1986.
Top Dollar Abroad, Crisis at Home
Like the South Africans, thousands of ex-military men from around
the
world are flocking to Iraq to find jobs that they cannot get
in their home
countries. Derek William Adgey, a Royal Marine from Belfast,
who was
jailed for four years for helping the Ulster Freedom Fighters,
was hired
by Armor Group, a British company, to guard Bechtel employees.
(He was
subsequently suspended when the Belfast Telegraph published
details of his
past.)
Former members of the British military get top dollar in Iraq
- as much as
a $250,000 a year - from the terrified American businessmen
working in
Iraq, about three times more than they can earn in Britain.
John Davidson,
who runs Rubicon International, a British security company whose
interests
in Iraq include contracts with BP and Motorola, told the Scotsman
newspaper that they preferred to hire former members of Britain's
special
forces, like the Special Air Service (SAS). "The SAS are
extremely
well-trained, low-profile, not waving flags. They go about things
in a
quiet manner, they are the crme de la crme," he says.
The boom in Iraq has caused a small crisis back at home for
the British
and South African security forces. The Scotsman estimates that
one in six
SAS and SBS (Special Boat Service) men have asked for permission
to quit
their jobs to go to Iraq. The British government is alarmed
by the trend
because it costs them as much as $3 million to train each of
these men.
Meanwhile the South African Police Services' elite task force,
a division
of 100 men who accompany senior politicians like President Thabo
Mbeki,
are facing an even more severe crisis with as many as half of
their
employees asking for early retirement in order to go to Iraq.
The $5,000
monthly salary for these men is equivalent to about six months
pay at
home. "What is alarming is that members of specialized
units are
resigning. It will have a negative effect to lose that experience
-- it
takes at least a year to train them," Henrie Boshoff, an
Institute for
Security Studies military analyst, told The Sunday Independent
newspaper
in South Africa.
Aaron Glantz is a correspondent for Free Speech Radio News.
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