U.S. Soldiers, Back in Iraq, Find Security Forces in Disrepair

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/world/middleeast/iraq-military-united-states-forces-camp-taji.html

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CAMP TAJI, Iraq — Lt. Col. John Schwemmer is here for his sixth Iraq deployment. Maj. James Modlin is on his fourth. Sgt. Maj. Thomas Foos? “It’s so many, I would rather not say. Sir.”

These soldiers are among 300 from the 5-73 Squadron of the 82nd Airborne Division of the United States Army, about half of them trainers, the rest support and force protection. Stationed at this old Iraqi military base 20 miles north of Baghdad, they are as close as it gets to American boots on the ground in Iraq.

Back now for the first time since the United States left in 2011, none of them thought they would be here again, let alone return to find the Iraqi Army they had once trained in such disrepair.

Colonel Schwemmer said he was stunned at the state in which he found the Iraqi soldiers when he arrived here. “It’s pretty incredible,” he said. “I was kind of surprised. What training did they have after we left?”

Apparently, not much. The current, woeful state of the Iraqi military raises the question not so much of whether the Americans left too soon, but whether a new round of deployments for training will have any more effect than the last.

Iraq’s army looked good on paper when the Americans left, after one of the biggest training missions carried out under wartime conditions. But after that, senior Iraqi officers began buying their own commissions, paying for them out of the supply, food and payroll money of their troops. Corruption ran up and down the ranks; desertion was rife.

The army did little more than staff checkpoints. Then, last year, four divisions collapsed overnight in Mosul and elsewhere in northern Iraq under the determined assault of Islamic State fighters numbering in the hundreds or at most the low thousands, and the extremists’ advance came as far as this base.

An army that once counted 280,000 active-duty personnel, one of the largest in the world, is now believed by some experts to have as few as four to seven fully active divisions — as little as 50,000 troops by some estimates. The director of media operations for Iraq’s Ministry of Defense, Qais al-Rubaiae, said, however, that even by the most conservative estimates, the army now had at least 141,000 soldiers in 15 divisions.

Most of the American soldiers were intimately involved in training Iraqi forces before, too. “When I left in 2009,” Major Modlin said, “they had it, they really did. I don’t know what happened after that.”

“We used to say that every deployment was different,” Major Modlin said. “But we quickly found out that this time was completely different from any other time. The Iraqis know that this time we’re not going to do it for them, and they appreciate that.”

The 300 American soldiers here, with a smaller number of United States Marines at Al Asad air base in Anbar Province, are the only American soldiers deployed outside Baghdad. But as the military sees it, they do not count as “boots on the ground” since their role is purely to train, advise and assist, as part of a 3,000-person deployment authorized in November by President Obama.

In fact, Master Sgt. Mike Lavigne, a military spokesman (one tour in Iraq and three in Afghanistan), does not like that term at all. “We do not have a single boot on the ground,” he said. “Really, not one.”

Even in a training role, however, this venerable Iraqi military base puts American soldiers very close to what passes for a front line in the conflict with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. From time to time, the extremists lob mortar rounds from their hiding places east of the base, just across the Tigris River.

There is little chance they will hit anything. The base is huge, and their aim is as bad as it was in Al Qaeda’s day, when the Americans were last here — and used it as a major training base. Nonetheless, no one goes around without body armor on.

On Thursday, the American instructors were leading a live-fire exercise, teaching basic small-unit maneuvering while firing at pop-up targets. Squad-size groups of Iraqi soldiers charged through a scrub-brush field, so realistic fires popped up around them.

“Small-unit maneuvering is pretty standard the world over,” Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Ames said. As basic as the training was, many of the trainees — even those in the army already more than a year — had never experienced it.

It was a striking departure from the last years of the Iraq war, when American and Iraqi soldiers were carefully separated at training facilities. Live ammunition was rarely used when they were together in the latter years of the American presence, for fear of so-called insider attacks, in which soldiers assault their Western allies.

“You have to have a level of trust, and we’re with them here,” Colonel Schwemmer said. “It’s the common enemy that ties us together.”

Sgt. Ali Mesin Hamid, the squad leader, was clearly appreciative. “We’ve never had training this good,” he said after his men went through the exercise, exulting at having hit all the targets. “We’ll be ready for the real fight.”

Their American drill instructor, Sgt. First Class James Grimes (four deployments to Iraq), had a more nuanced view, as he showed the soldiers a sandbox representing the field they had just been on. Bottle caps stood for each fighter and piles of sand for their firing positions.

“You guys saw how quick you ran out of ammo, right?” he said. And they needed to concentrate more on making sure their fields of fire overlapped, covering a broader area than just the targets they could see. “Other than that, pretty good.”

Those soldiers were already in their fifth week of a six-week basic training course; some will come back for an additional three weeks. In all, 3,600 from two Iraqi brigades are in the American training program, and 4,600 more have graduated since the program began late last year.

With the Taji training site running at maximum capacity, as it is now, that means the program will reach at most about 30,000 Iraqi soldiers by the end of this year, probably far fewer. The Marines at Al Asad train smaller numbers of regular soldiers.

“They’re going to leave here trained,” Colonel Schwemmer said. “But there’s a big difference between trained and seasoned.”

Whether those who are trained go straight into the fight against the Islamic State is not a decision the Americans will be part of. That, they say, is entirely an Iraqi government decision. Given the shortages of troops in the fight against the Islamic State, deployment on the front lines seems pretty likely.

Many of the trainees were relatively new recruits, who had joined straight after the collapse of the military in the face of the Islamic State’s onslaught in June. Some had originally joined the popular Shiite militias, which are credited with halting the extremists’ advance after the military fell apart.

But they are also blamed for human rights abuses and the deepening rift between Sunnis and Shiites, which the Sunni-based insurgency has exploited.

Ahmed Abud Hassan, 21, joined after his cousin at Camp Speicher was presumably killed among the 1,700 prisoners executed there by the Islamic State. Sajad Hakim, 21, had a brother in Mosul in the military who was never seen again.

The two men, Shiites from Diwaniya, said they eventually chose the military over the militias; for one thing, it offered better pay and a pension.

“We’re not going to stop,” Mr. Hassan said. “We’re going to keep fighting in their honor.”

Their Iraqi regimental commander, Maj. Masar Hasim (six deployments with American soldiers, and three other wars), was a veteran of a half-dozen battlefields against the Islamic State in the past year, but he said this was the first time his men had received any meaningful training.

“This is a completely different level of training, nothing like what we had before,” he said. But the Iraqi major was cleareyed about their ability and thought it would be a long time before they made a difference in the field.

“If I get 100 good soldiers out of this 400 we have here, I would feel like a king,” he said.