On 8/29/06, Leigh Meyers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I guess they'll need to send more US troops. Large numbers of Iraqi > soldiers and police are refusing to deploy to Baghdad.
On 8/29/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
That's news to me. How "large"?
August 28, 2006/New York TIMES 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. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/world/middleeast/28cnd-military.html -- Jim Devine / "Self-exhaustion in war has killed more states than any foreign assailant." -- BH Liddell Hart.
