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Iraqi soldiers refusing missions in baghdad { August 28 2006 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/world/middleeast/28cnd-military.html?_r=1&oref=sloginhttp://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/world/middleeast/28cnd-military.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
August 28, 2006
Group of Iraqi Soldiers Refuses to Go to Baghdad
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
WASHINGTON, Aug. 28 — A group of Iraqi soldiers refused to go to Baghdad to participate in the effort to restore order in the Iraqi capital, a senior American military officer said today.
Brig. Gen. Dana Pittard, who oversees the American-led effort to train the Iraqi Army, said the episode involved about 100 Iraqi soldiers, who were based in Iraq’s southern Maysan province, which borders Iran. The soldiers’ refusal to deploy is under formal investigation and the Iraqi government will soon decide whether to rescind the deployment order to their parent unit: the Second Battalion of the Fourth Brigade of the 10th Iraq Army.
“The majority of this particular unit was Shia and they felt — the leadership of that unit and their soldiers — like they were needed down there in Maysan, in that province,” General Pittard told Pentagon reporters in a video-conference from Iraq. “ Now that will be worked out by the Iraqi government and the Ministry of Defense, and we’ll be in support of that.”
Though the episode involves a small fraction of the 10-division Iraq Army, it points to a deep issue in recruiting the force. The new Iraqi government wants to build a national military, one that can be deployed anywhere within the country and that is not a collection of local units with regional loyalties.
But many Iraqis are reluctant to serve outside their home province. Sunni Arabs are reluctant to join the Iraqi Army if it means they will be send far from home to predominantly Shiite areas. Shiites, for their part, are hesitant to serve in regions that are overwhelmingly Sunni. “The Iraqi Army is supposed to be a national army,” General Pittard said. “They were recruited regionally and for the most part they’ve been operating regionally. So that’s where the difficulty is.”
This is not the first time that Iraqi soldiers had refused to deploy to a distant area. A large number of soldiers from a largely Kurdish unit in northern Iraq — the Second Battalion, Third Brigade of the Second Iraqi division — refused to go to Ramadi, where soldiers from the United States Army’s First Armored Division have been involved in a tough fight to take the city back from insurgents, General Pittard said.
In the case of Iraq units in the Anbar province in western Iraq, soldiers have deployed but their units have experienced high attrition rates. Partly because many soldiers have gone AWOL, the day-to-day strength of the two Iraqis divisions in that province are, respectively, 35 percent and 50 percent.
The continuing operation in Baghdad, which is dubbed Together Forward, is intended to break the cycle of sectarian violence that threatens to plunge the country into civil war. Under the plan, American and Iraqi forces work their way through the city, neighborhood by neighborhood, in an effort to clear these areas of insurgents and militias. Once the areas are secured, the plan is to hand them over to the Iraqi police, who will be working with American advisors. Millions of dollars in Iraqi and American money are also to be spent to restore essential services, create jobs and try to build good will for the new Iraqi government.
An additional 12,000 troops have been sent to Baghdad to carry out the operation, 7,000 of whom are American. Some of the Americans troops have been diverted from other parts of Iraq. The Iraqi soldiers who refused to deploy from the Maysan areas were to be part of the Iraqi reinforcements.
The American military has a system to rate the readiness of the Iraqi Army to carry out operations, with one being the highest level and four being the lowest. While such information has been made public in the past, General Pittard declined to provide specific information about the readiness level for the 10 Iraqi divisions, saying that it could be useful to insurgents.
He said an important milestone would be reached in September when the Eighth Iraqi Army division is to be placed under the control of the Iraqi Ground Forces Command. The division is located in the central part of southern Iraq, which has tended to be less violent than the greater Baghdad area.
“It will be the first time that an Iraqi division will no longer be under the tactical control of the coalition forces,” General Pittard said.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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