To free up money and positions in the Anbar province to integrate Sunni tribal fighters into its security forces, the government of Iraq is combing through its payroll lists to shake out “ghost soldiers” — names gathering a paycheck where there is no actual soldier fighting.
“They’re going to cut from their roles those soldiers who you know…are no longer in the ranks. We think that’s going to open up immediately about 3,000 positions in the Anbar-based divisions, and that number will go up,” Brett McGurk, President Obama’s envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter the Islamic State, part of the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, told reporters this week.
It’s not the first time the U.S. has worked with the Iraqi government to shed thousands of “ghost soldiers” from the payroll.
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Retired Army Lt. Gen. James Dubik was the commander of Multi-National Security and Transition Command — Iraq, and as such was responsible for the growth of Iraqi Security Forces during the surge in 2007-08. Back then, Iraq’s ministries of Interior and Defense also purged their payrolls to free up funds for new recruits.
Dubik said that while they found names of soldiers not actually fighting, corruption was not always the reason for the padded list.
“Sometimes Iraqi commanders allowed the rolls to be padded so they could rake money off the top,” Dubik said. But he also learned the extra names were Iraq’s way of taking care of its war-wounded and war-dead.
“Iraq doesn’t have a program to take care of deceased soldiers or the wounded,” said Dubik, now a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of War. “So part of what we discovered when we scrubbed it the last time was that was the way the government took care of their families.”
But the use of the Iraqi Army’s operating budget to cover those extra costs and to pad the rolls may have grossly exaggerated the actual size of the force last year as it faced the Islamic State. In December, months after the Army’s defeat in Mosul, the new Iraqi government announced it had discovered up to 50,000 “ghost soldiers” on the payroll.
In the past few months, Iraq has struggled to pay for new recruits, which has become another impediment to its ability to reconstitute the Iraqi Army.
While the additional U.S. forces announced this week for Iraq will include advisers who can help the Iraqi Army with its administrative and logistical planning, U.S. Central Command spokesman Col. Pat Ryder said Friday that shaking out the payroll is “ultimately something for the government of Iraq to work through,” but will help them in the long run.
“Clearly for Iraq to be able to increase the number of recruits and to ensure that they have accountability for all their forces — that’s a positive thing,” Ryder said.
