In Iraq, an Army Day for No Army

Tuesday would have been Bashim Husham’s big day.

The 31-year-old had been waiting years for this Jan. 6, a national holiday commemorating the Iraqi army’s 1921 founding and the day officers traditionally were promoted. Husham would have moved up from major to lieutenant colonel. He had expected a day of singing military songs with his comrades in arms, followed by trips to a photo studio and a posh restaurant where he would have celebrated with his family.

Instead, Husham woke up about noon and slouched on his couch in an Adidas track suit, one of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers who became unemployed when the U.S.-led occupation dissolved their army.

Tuesday’s Army Day commemoration featured violent demonstrations by ex-soldiers and soul-searching by former officers about their role in a new society. For military men, it was a reminder of what they lost when the army was eliminated.

“This is the first time this day passes in sadness,” Husham said. “We used to pass this day with joy, congratulating each other.... [Now] it’s a dull time. It’s just sitting around the house without doing anything.”

Although Saddam Hussein regularly wore combat fatigues and liked to pose with missiles, Kalashnikovs and other military trappings, many Iraqis say the armed forces have long been identified with professionalism and national sovereignty rather than the deposed dictator. In a country shaken by foreign invasion, crime and suicide bombings, some say they long for an institution that represented stability and national pride -- even though it violently quelled uprisings and used chemical weapons against its enemies, among them Iranians and Iraqi Kurds.

“Iraqis and Arabs in general are naturally nostalgic for old establishments,” said former Capt. Khalid Sulayman, 34. “Now we feel nostalgia for the army. Now that we have lost that establishment, we are longing for it.”

Sulayman and several other former military men contended that the army served the Iraqi people rather than Hussein.

The army was created 16 years before Hussein was born. Compulsory service meant most Iraqi men spent time in military barracks. The army bore the brunt of the Iran-Iraq and Persian Gulf wars, both disasters. Its poorly paid rank and file were both respected and pitied.

When the U.S.-led coalition eliminated the military in May, it threw 350,000 men out of work and sowed resentment among a wide swath of Iraqi society. Authorities say many ex-soldiers supported the insurgency. Some American military officials have acknowledged that the wholesale dismissal of the rank and file was a mistake.

The coalition-appointed Iraqi Governing Council gave a nod to the army’s place in Iraqi society when it issued a statement marking Tuesday’s holiday, the 83rd anniversary of the creation of the Iraqi armed forces. The council argued that Hussein’s government “worked on dismantling army traditions and bonds” and used it to sow oppression and commit massacres.

Under Hussein, the council added, the army was exploited to gain “absolute control” over the people and used to repress democracy. The council pledged that the new military “will not interfere in the nation’s political matters and its role will be limited to guarding and defending the Iraqi borders.”

Tuesday’s celebration featured a graduation ceremony of the second battalion of 700 soldiers from an American-run academy. While a band played the Iraqi national anthem, the graduating class marched down the field using the same drill tradition as the old army.

To many ex-soldiers, the new Iraqi military represents a dismal copy of the storied Iraqi armed forces.

“We are not a proper army,” said Hasam Aheem Rabbas, a former soldier in the old military who stood guard in central Baghdad on Tuesday as a corporal in the new civil defense force.

Former Brig. Gen. Basel Saleh recalled marching in student protests in 1956, during the reign of King Faisal II, when police beat students until the army came and held the cops at bay. For Saleh, Jan. 6 is a reminder of what he called “the glorious history of the Iraqi army.”

Many former soldiers took advantage of the day’s symbolism to vent their frustration about the elimination of the armed forces and the regular paycheck the service brought. Former soldiers, who were promised monthly stipends of as much as $150, say they have yet to receive the money.

About 3,000 former soldiers demanding their pay marched through the southern city of Basra on Tuesday and tried to storm a bank, only to be turned back by private security and Iraqi police gunfire, according to the British military, which controls the city. Associated Press reported that one demonstrator was killed and four were injured. Jonathan Turner, a spokesman for the British military, said he could confirm one injury. He said the military would try to pay some ex-soldiers today.

Several hundred protesters also marched through the city of Baqubah, outside Baghdad, calling for back pay and the revival of the army.

Other military men went about their regular routines.

Ibrahim Ghranaim Dulaymi, who once slipped on the crisp uniform of an Iraqi air force lieutenant, made trips to Baghdad markets Tuesday to trade cookware and plastic cups. Dulaymi said he sometimes uses his family’s 25-year-old Fiat to hustle fares as a taxi driver.

“Military people know nothing of civilian life,” he said Tuesday evening as he sat in the yard of his family home, listening to the echo of nearby gunfire, which he said could be either a wedding celebration or robbers. “I am a military man, but I have to do such work, for how else would I make a living?”

Mudhar Abdul-Baqi Bakri, a former lieutenant colonel in the army’s special forces, beams with pride when he tells of how American troops circled around the town he was charged with defending last year rather than risk a direct fight.

He spent Tuesday afternoon at a meeting between American commanders and retired Iraqi officers, where the Iraqis complained of irregular pensions and discussed the need for a national army. Bakri said the meeting went well, but the lack of the military has left a void in his life.

Bakri survives on money sent by his brother, a doctor in Michigan, but said he longs for work. Private firms have tried to recruit him as a bodyguard for $300 a month. That’s a good salary in Iraq, but he rejected the offers. “It is so remote from the honor of being an officer,” Bakri said.

Suheil Ahmed of The Times’ Baghdad Bureau contributed to this report.