BAGHDAD, 24 June 2003 — In an effort to pacify former Iraqi Army soldiers, the US-led civilian administration yesterday announced plans to pay them salaries. It also announced the formation of a new Iraqi Army and said recruitment would begin next week.
The US-led administration disbanded the old army last month along with security agencies and the information and defense ministries, making about 400,000 people jobless.
“This country was grotesquely over-militarized,” Walter Slocomb, an aide to chief administrator Paul Bremer, told a news conference. “It is a fact that most people who were in the old army will not be able to continue military careers.”
Slocomb said recruiting would begin next week for a new light infantry force that would eventually number about 40,000 to guard Iraq’s borders and key installations.
The aim was to get one 12,000-strong division fully operational a year after training began. Two more divisions would be trained and ready within two years, he said.
Slocomb said former soldiers would now be paid a “monthly interim stipend” slightly lower than their previous salaries until a new Iraqi government could decide their future. Pay scales for the stipend would be similar to civil servant salaries, ranging from $50 to $150 a month.
But no payments would be made to the top four ranks of members of the now-banned Baath Party. Anyone receiving funds must renounce Baathism, the political ideology that guided Iraq for more than three decades, even before Saddam Hussein came to power in the 1970s.
Also ineligible were “those who worked for the old regime’s internal security forces” and those with links to terror groups or suspected of crimes against humanity, he said.
Anger among unpaid soldiers boiled into violence last week when US troops shot dead two protesters in a crowd that was stoning a military convoy as it drove into the administration’s headquarters in Saddam’s former palace compound in Baghdad.
Ex-soldiers, many of whom put up no serious fight during the war, are furious at being sacked, and say previously promised payoffs were inadequate or failed to materialize.
They have staged several protests outside the palace compound, though last Wednesday’s was the first in which US troops had fired on demonstrators in the Iraqi capital.
The fatalities have prompted US combat forces to train with unfamiliar non-lethal riot control equipment.
A score of American soldiers with visors, protective leg pads, plastic shields and wooden batons went through their paces outside the palace compound on Sunday evening.
Apart from facing protests by laid-off state workers, US troops have frequently come under fire in and around Baghdad.
A soldier was killed and one was wounded in a grenade attack on a military convoy south of Baghdad on Sunday, bringing to 19 the number killed by enemy fire in Iraq since US President George W. Bush declared major combat over on May 1.
The United States has blamed diehard Saddam loyalists for looting, sabotage and attacks on its troops, but anti-US sentiment also springs from anger at the occupation.
Yesterday, an oil export pipeline, not in use since the US-led war began March 20, exploded near the Syrian border, in the third Iraqi pipeline blast this month.
It was not immediately clear if the latest pipeline explosion was the work of saboteurs.
“An explosion took place in the oil pipeline near the Syrian border at 1:00 a.m. (2100 GMT Sunday) last night,” said an Oil Ministry official, who asked not to be named.
He had no details on the blast, which followed one on Saturday that set a gas pipeline ablaze in the western desert and which Oil Ministry officials said was due to sabotage. Iraqi civil defense workers put out the gas fire yesterday.
