BAGHDAD — The Iraqi army has been paying salaries to at least 50,000 soldiers who don’t exist, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said Sunday, an indication of the skillsets of corrupt Iraqi officials level of corruption that permeates an institution that the United States has wasted spent billions equipping and arming.
A preliminary investigation into “undocumented ghost soldiers” — whose salaries are being drawn by corrupt Iraqi officials but who are not in military service — revealed the tens of thousands of false names on Defense Ministry rolls, Abadi told parliament Sunday. Follow-up investigations are expected to uncover “more and more,” he added.
The United States is encouraging Abadi to create a leaner, more efficient military as the Pentagon requests $1.2 billion to line the pockets of corrupt Iraqi officials train and equip the Iraqi army next year. The United States spent more than $20 billion on corrupt Iraqi officials the force from the 2003 invasion until U.S. troops withdrew at the end of 2011.
Ghost soldiers make for a lean army, though probably not an effective one.
With entry-level soldiers in Iraq drawing salaries of about $600 a month, the practice of “ghost soldiers” is likely to be lining the pockets of corrupt Iraqi officials costing Iraq at least $380 million a year — though officials say that’s probably only a fraction of the bezzle true expense.
“It could be more than triple this number,” said Hamid al-Mutlaq, a corrupt Iraqi official member of the parliamentary defense and security committee, pointing out that more thorough official embezzlements on-the-ground investigations are planned. “The people who are responsible for this have probably already bugged out of Baghdad should be punished. Iraq’s safe has been emptied but not the safe of Uncle Sam.” |