Iraqi Village Keeps Past From Repeating Itself

Pentagon strategists have a vision of a new Iraqi army that is well-trained, disciplined and welcomed by those it protects.

The residents of this village in northern Iraq have memories of a very different army. And they’re taking no chances.

For decades, villagers say, the Iraqi army and despised paramilitaries loyal to Saddam Hussein terrorized them, raping women and carrying out interrogations and torture from a base at the edge of this small town about 15 miles southeast of Mosul. When the soldiers fled as Hussein’s regime fell, town officials installed a volunteer guard around the base to ward off looters. They wanted to use it as a youth recreation center.

But when town fathers heard reports that the Americans wanted to use the base to train a new Iraqi army, the security guards were withdrawn and the word went out: Tear it down.

“They were guarding it and then they said, ‘Go ahead. We want it razed to the ground,’ ” said Foud Jerma, 22, a looter with a cross tattooed on his forearm, perspiring as he broke apart foundation stones.

Iraqis here and elsewhere fear a new state security force, and their attitude illustrates one of the greatest difficulties the U.S.-led occupation forces face in stabilizing the country and shifting responsibility back to Iraqis. Many residents don’t trust their own countrymen to carry out their duties without returning to the ways of the past.

“We don’t want to relive the bad history,” said Louis Qassab, the Catholic priest who oversees both the civic and religious affairs of this predominantly Christian town. “God gave us the gift of forgetting. We want to forget what happened here before.

“If there is a military base here, the Americans will not have liberated us,” Qassab added.

What was one of the few military sites that had suffered only minor looting a month ago is now one of the few where looting goes on unabated. Attacked by dozens of sledgehammer-wielding residents, few of the buildings are more than a handful of stacked bricks.

A sign on the lone remaining wall of one read in Arabic: “The military intelligence center. The eyes of the country.”

A few blocks away, a battered Mercedes-Benz truck and a horse-drawn cart hauled looted bricks that resell for less than a dime past beat-walking police officers and a soldier from the Army’s 101st Airborne Division standing guard outside a government building.

Iraqis’ mistrust of their own soldiers is so profound that they destroyed the buildings -- and their hoped-for youth center -- based on little more than a rumor. The actual army training site is a nearly five hours’ drive to the south, in the equally small and similarly named Diyala province village of Kerkush, said Walt Slocum, the American advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority who is responsible for establishing an Iraqi Ministry of Defense.

“It’s easy to understand the confusion,” said Slocum, who noted that the site was chosen for its isolation. “When we tell Iraqis where it is they kind of look at us with a blank stare.”

A number of sites will eventually be used to train the new army under a $48-million contract given to Northrop Grumman’s private security subsidiary, Vinnell Corp. A spokesman said the 101st Airborne Division began preparing a site near Qara Quosh last month.

The first 12,000 troops are to be trained at the remote Kerkush site. Other areas are also likely to be selected with an eye to separating them from civilian areas, said a senior official of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

That news came too late for Qara Quosh to save its youth center. Every door, window and stick of furniture is gone, and a makeshift crew of resident looters spent the weekend taking down the few remaining walls on the site.

Most, if not all, of the looters are Christians who said they had at least the tacit approval of the church that governs the town on behalf of all its residents, including its minority Muslim Arabs and Kurds.

Qassab, the priest, denied that the church gave orders to destroy the site, contradicting the story told by several looters there. However, he acknowledged that he was pleased it could no longer house soldiers.

“They would come to the civilian streets and bother families and the women. We were always going there and asking them to keep the army away from the city,” Qassab said. “We are saying very forcefully that we do not want a military base here.”

Baram Khalil recalled how two village girls were kidnapped and sexually assaulted at the base, but never told their story until the military left because they feared for their lives. After the soldiers left, Khalil said, he was among the security guards the Kurdistan Democratic Party sent in to join the community volunteers in securing the site until American commanders, wary of the armed militia, asked them to leave.

“What you see now is an entire camp destroyed because we didn’t want any military here,” said Khalil, speaking at the party’s village headquarters under a photograph of its president, Massoud Barzani. “People here saw many things with their own eyes that they don’t want repeated.”

The old regime’s army, a force of 400,000 ranging from conscripts to the elite Republican Guard, was widely feared not only by neighboring countries, but by domestic groups such as Shiite Muslims, Kurds and Christians. The new Iraqi army is not expected to exceed 40,000 soldiers when it begins functioning in three years.

U.S. military officials expect it to be a purely defensive force. No high-ranking members of the former ruling Baath Party, or anyone ranked colonel or above in the old Iraqi army, need apply.

Most analysts say the force will be far too small and its duties too restricted to pose much of a threat to the country’s neighbors -- or to Iraqis.

Qara Quosh’s impoverished community of chicken and rice farmers suffers from high unemployment and is desperate for economic development. Though he is in effect the mayor, the priest drives a faded white 1985 Toyota. Along the town’s main strip, raw sewage streams through the gutters in front of sidewalk cafes. Residents say they want economic development if it comes from coalition troops, but not if it means strange Iraqis with guns milling about the village, as in the past.

“Life here is so bad, we are destroying this place so we can take the rocks and sell them,” said Waleed Aziz, 40, taking a break from pulling down a wall at the former military base, where he planned to sell the bricks for 100 dinars apiece, less than a dime. “We want the American Army here, but if they want to train Iraqi soldiers here we want them to be from Qara Quosh.”

Fellow looter Ammar Sulaiman, 24, added, “If they gave us jobs and wages, we would never do this.”