Iraq, Inc. by Pratap Chatterjee

Author:Pratap Chatterjee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2010-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

WORLD’S LARGEST PRIVATE ARMY

In April 2004, rumors began to circulate that many of the private security contractors had started to band together, organizing what may be the largest private army in the world, with its own rescue teams and pooled, sensitive intelligence.

Nick Edmunds, Iraq coordinator for Hart (the group that hired the South African assassin killed in Kut), said, “There is absolutely a growing cooperation along unofficial lines. We try to give each other warnings about things we hear are about to happen.”

“There is no formal arrangement for intelligence-sharing,” Colonel Jill Morgenthaler, a spokeswoman for the occupation authorities in Baghdad, wrote in an email response to questions from the Washington Post. “However, ad hoc relationships are in place so that contractors can learn of dangerous areas or situations.”194 From the point of view of the contractors, this was a logical step. Many of them felt that the military was not very cooperative in providing sensitive information and the only way they could protect themselves was to create their own intelligence apparatus. But given that not all of these contractors have the shiniest of reputations, one could question whether this sharing of information might lead to revenge killings or even mistaken attacks on innocent people.

The sharing of resources has another important consequence: the blurring of these groups in the public eye. As far as the Iraqi public is concerned, the private military contractors—the men with guns who do not wear military uniforms—are CIA, and therefore legitimate targets. We were told repeatedly that the Baghdad hotel, officially a Dyncorp residence for police trainers, was a CIA base. In the eyes of the angry young man on Saddoun Street, the difference was unimportant—the hotel was housing the equivalent of the SS of Nazi Germany, of the Mukhabarat of Saddam’s Iraq.

This conflation is behind the resistance’s strategy of targeting security contract workers. For example, the four Italian hostages who made grisly headlines in April 2004 when one of them was executed on videotape were private security contractors. Fabrizio Quattrocchi, Maurizio Agliana, and Umberto Cupertino worked for a Nevada-based security firm called DTS. The fourth man, Salvatore Stefio, was president of a private security company called Presidium. (Quattrocchi was videotaped being killed with a shot to the head.)195

At least one security company, Bidepa, from Romania, which commanded a staff of eight working under a three-month contract as bodyguards for members of Iraq’s puppet government, pulled out of Iraq after one of its workers was killed and another injured in an ambush near Baghdad in April 2004, according to its director Dumitru Nicolae.196

Maybe these attacks were unintentional, but I got the distinct impression that private security contractors are among the top three targets, the other two being soldiers and Iraqi politicians or collaborators.

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