Via the Today in Iraq Weblog for 12/28/03, this article talks about the private cops and soldiers in Iraq: Iraq turns into bonanza for private security firms Sify News (India) 12/28/03.
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq has sunk into what the United States has characterised as "low intensity warfare" carried out by "desperate" former regime loyalists and "foreign terrorists".
Private security firms jumped in, turning the country into a magnet for veterans of guerrilla wars in Africa, Latin America and Northern Ireland and cops who worked America's meanest streets. And all of them are mainly motivated by cold hard cash.
"It is about finances first and foremost," said the [anonymous] British advisor, refusing to disclose details of his own remuneration. But he said that the starting monthly salary for security advisors in Iraq was about 10,000 dollars, more than double the going rate in Britain, and not counting expenses and extras. ...
Coming to grips with the number of security firms operating throughout Iraq and the exact nature of their missions is next to impossible. The biggest players in Iraq's security bonanza are US firms ArmorGroup and Haart and the British Control Risks Group (CR), and Erinys and Olive.
That is without mentioning the private armies employed by the likes of oil firm Halliburton and its unit Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), Bechtel and power giant General Electric, who are the biggest beneficiaries of Iraq's multi-billion dollar rebuilding contracts.
They're called "advisors" now? Whatever happened to the old terms like "mercenaries" and "soldiers of fortune"? And when you read down to the last paragraph, we hear the British "advisor" talking about how unreliable the locals are for security (my emphasis):
"They are not disciplined, you train them then the following week they go to 'Inshallah' because they have no white eye looking over at them," he added.
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