By Mark John
Reuters, 01 February 2006
They are ex-software engineers, physics teachers or high school graduates with a yearning to be soldiers. And in a year's time, they will be the officer class and hope-bearers of the new Iraqi army.
Recruits to the Iraqi Military Academy in the suburb of Rustamiya in southeast Baghdad may be on a steep learning curve. But their determination to serve their country is unswerving.
"This will be my coffin," said one young student, patting his body armor and voicing his ambition to dive into the fight against insurgents. Like other trainees, he declined to be named to protect himself and his family from possible reprisals.
The success of the Rustamiya compound, staffed by a mix of U.S.-led coalition and NATO trainers, could be crucial in determining how quickly U.S. forces can hand over responsibility for security to domestic Iraqi forces and withdraw troops.
The foot soldiers of Iraq's post-Saddam army are being trained elsewhere, but their orders will come from the 1,000 cadets, officers and defense officials shaped here each year. Junior officers are in particularly short supply.
Built in 1924 by the British after their creation of Iraq from provinces of the collapsed Ottoman empire, Rustamiya saw generations of Iraqi officers pass through its gates until it was abandoned in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of 2003.
Now it is run by a multinational training team whose job is to infuse their charges with best military practice.
"We want them to understand that leadership is a responsibility, not an entitlement," U.S. Lieutenant-General Martin Dempsey told Reuters.
"That means they should be the first on patrol, the last to eat and that they are out there (fighting) with the others," said Dempsey, overall commander of military training in Iraq.
FROM SADDAM TO SANDHURST
Candidate students are designated only by numbered bibs. The code of anonymity is an attempt to protect their identity from outsiders and to encourage Shi'ite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish recruits to leave ethnic tensions at the gate.
Their trainers say many students do not tell their families what they are doing at Rustamiya, either for security reasons or fear of disapproval. Some trainees from Baghdad often take up to four separate taxi rides to avoid being tailed.
The 12-month leadership and military tactics course they take is modeled on the British officers' course at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, tailored for counter-insurgency operations and with some course material in Arabic.
"Motivation is not a problem," said British Army Captain Duncan Forbes, one of the course supervisors.
"They genuinely believe in the new Iraq thing. They know people killed by the insurgents. They know they are going to get amongst it (the fighting) in six to 12 months."
Tougher to deal with is the reluctance -- partly a legacy of the Saddam era in which all military decision-making was the preserve of an elite -- to hone and use leadership skills expected of junior officers in Western armies.
"I know exactly how they feel," said trainer Laszlo Nagy, an officer with the Hungarian army, who compared the recruits' mentality to his as a soldier in formerly communist Hungary.
"When I joined the army as NCO (non-commissioned officer), I was nothing. It was all in the hands of a few top officers and these guys have the same feeling," he said.
ETHICS FOCUS
Even veteran officers and defense officials taking more advanced courses from NATO trainers elsewhere on the campus confess to facing challenges unimaginable under Saddam.
One senior planning manager in the Defense Ministry said she and other pupils sat up until 3:30 a.m. one morning after being told to devise a plan to cope with a sudden influx of refugees on Iraq's border within 24 hours.
"What was completely new for me is the democracy background -- how the army serve and help civilians," said a fellow student, a middle-aged colonel from the northern city of Mosul.
Senior officer training is rounded off by political lectures on subjects such as the Russian revolution and the church's role through European history.
Ethics is also a major component, amid concerns that the new Iraqi army should not resort to tactics used against civilians under Saddam -- or indeed to abuses seen on occasion among the occupying forces since the invasion.
"We show how NATO countries have behaved with prisoners of war, discuss the minimal use of force and how to say 'no' to unlawful orders," said Danish Lieutenant-Colonel Claus Larsten.
Coalition officials play down the fear that they could be training soldiers who will end up commanding rival brigades if Iraq descends into a civil war.
Dempsey said classes reflected the mix of Iraqi society, with a rough 60 percent Shias, 20 percent Sunnis and 20 percent Kurds. Trainers said ethnic tensions were not visible, although acknowledged they could be missing some of the signs.
Nobody in the training effort is prepared to say how long it would be before a new Iraqi officer class has firmly taken root.
Seventeen NATO countries have provided staff to help provide training in Iraq. Some alliance officials note the effort could be sped up if more had come forward but rule out war opponents such as France and Germany setting foot in the country.
"To really get it (the officer corps) to an anchor point will take a few years," said General James Jones, the supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, on a visit to the compound.
"There is no short cut -- this will take time."
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Citation: Mark John. "New Iraq officers on sharp learning curve," Reuters, 01 February 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=572&ncid=572&e=3&u=/nm/20060201/lf_nm/iraq_officers_dc_1
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