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The two
classes currently training at Zahko are also the
first to integrate Arabs and Kurds—a delicate
situation in a country rife with ethnic and
sectarian tension. The nation’s other academies are
less balanced. Rustamiyah, near Baghdad, is 98
percent Arab, and Qualachulon in Sulemaniyah is 95
percent Kurdish. (About a third of Zahko's students
are Arab; the others are Kurdish. It’s not known how
many of the Arabs are Shia or Sunni.)
Originally a training camp for Kurdish peshmerga, or
military forces, the Zahko academy was given to the
Ministry of Defense after the Coalition invasion.
Since then, a small team of American soldiers has
been living on campus, advising the instructors on
better ways to train the cadets. Their success would
be a major boon for the Iraqi Army. Well-trained
officers who can lead their own soldiers (including
Sunni Arabs, the group most underrepresented in
security forces), Americans say, is what the Iraqi
Army now needs most.
The man in charge, Major General Shihid Abdulrahman,
twists his mouth into a smirk when he recalls the
day he first arrived to take over at Zahko back in
1996, long before the downfall of Saddam. There was
no electricity. The class of 21 cadets had nowhere
to sleep because the barracks had been overtaken by
squatters from nearby villages. The cadets trained
on a dusty field with archaic methods, relying on
British Army manuals dating to the 1920s.
Instructors invented rules to toughen up the troops:
morning exercises lasted two or three hours in their
bulky army uniforms and boots, and they weren't
given any water, even as the temperature exceeded
100 degrees.
A lot has changed since the Americans arrived. The
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has transformed the
campus, spending $6 million to renovate the existing
facilities and build new barracks, guard towers,
dining facilities, a gym, pool and soccer field, and
water and sewage treatment plants. They also added a
rifle and grenade range, and a rappel tower. At the
front gate, a row of five soldiers salutes incoming
vehicles, guns at the ready. Lines of troops march
in lockstep across a wide paved field, chanting
songs in Kurdish and Arabic. Another set of cadets,
their faces serious, jog in formation to class, a
small notebook and pen clutched in each right hand.
The instructors have adopted most of the Americans'
advice. "Whatever they tell us, they've been through
it," Abdulrahman says. "So they know better than we
do." Some are simple changes: cadets work out in
shorts and T-shirts and they're allowed to drink
water during drills. Instead of hopping up and down
during physical training, they do pushups. Everyone
is required to wear protective gear on the firing
range and has been taught to hold their weapons
properly. They've also learned how to plan in
advance for missions and organize a convoy. The
Americans also introduced them to GPS technology and
PowerPoint. Of course, not everything is done
according to the American way. "They place high
importance on marching here, and we do that very
well," Babakir says. "We spend hours marching."
On a recent training day, Abdulrahman, his maroon
beret fitted perfectly over his bristly red hair,
walked down to the paved parade ground to watch new
recruits perform a drill in which they must attempt
to balance on one leg. When asked how they're doing,
his smile widens. "It's not even 24 hours since
they've arrived, so I can't tell you," he says. He
steps over to one especially tall cadet struggling
to hold his position and lifts the young man's leg a
few more inches. "None of my sons would join the
army," he says, stepping back to watch the cadet
with approval. (They instead chose medicine, law and
engineering.) He watches the formation a few more
moments, then strolls on. "Each one of them is like
family to me," he says. "There is no difference—I
have to take care of them."
In interviews conducted by a translator, four
cadets, Arab and Kurd, said they were anxious to
start piecing their country back together. "This
training is good for us," says Lazim Mahjoub, a
22-year-old Arab from Kirkuk. "[It's] hard, but they
are making us better officers to protect all of
Iraq. The hardest thing for me is to hear of news of
Iraqi citizens being killed by the terrorists for no
reason—the training is not as hard as that."
The school isn't entirely isolated from the
country's violence. There's no denying that the
Iraqi Army has been infiltrated by insurgents, even
if it's not to the extent that the country's police
forces are dominated by Shiite militiamen. More
applicants from the Shia-dominated south has made
the school more cautious. Abdulrahman says Zahko
runs background checks on every applicant, and
searches cadets when they check in at the front
gate. He also instructs platoon leaders to closely
monitor cadets for suspicious words or behaviors.
"The law of averages tells you that we've had a
couple of bad guys here," says Lt. Col. Neal Norman,
one of the academy's American advisers. Indeed, in
February American intelligence uncovered evidence
that a Zahko student from Mosul had insurgent ties.
The cadet dropped out and disappeared before he
could be arrested.
If there is hope for the Iraqi Army, it's in the
resilience of these aspiring officers. A few months
ago, one young cadet visiting home in Baghdad was
gunned down outside his parents' front gate. It's
unclear whether he was targeted specifically because
he studied at the academy—violence in Baghdad is
often too random to be sure of the killers or the
cause. But for his friends and classmates, his death
underscored the risks they all take just by showing
up for physical training and history classes. When
they heard the news, his classmates, some of them
crying, gathered together, Arab and Kurd.
Babakir was especially devastated. Because they both
lived so far from home, they hung out together on
weekends when other cadets went home to their
families. "I promised myself that I would not forget
him and that I would be a good officer to avenge his
death and the death of other youths in Iraq," he
says. The cadets hung a photograph of him in their
barracks. And then they went back to their drills.
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