Word: iraqi
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...Like many here, al-A'ghayde is wary of the government, and he is quick to draw comparisons between the dissolution of the SOIs and the disbanding of the Iraqi army. "It's the same thing, exactly," he says. "The American forces betrayed us. It's as if they took us down a path and then stopped us halfway...
...Brigadier General David Perkins, the senior officer overseeing the SOI transition, rejects the comparison as invalid. "This is a completely different situation than when the army was dissolved," he says, "because [for the Iraqi army] there were no guarantees, there were no contracts, there were no transition plans, there were no rehearsals, there were no efforts made by anyone." This time, he says, the U.S. military has exerted "an enormous amount of time and energy" to make sure "this is done properly...
...Unlike the members of the former Iraqi army, who were abruptly dismissed and deprived of their livelihoods, each SOI member will continue to be paid during the transition, regardless of whether he ends up in the security forces or a trade apprenticeship. On average, each guard gets a salary of about $300 a month. In a country where unemployment is running at a staggering 60% (according to the quarterly U.S. report on reconstruction efforts), the payments are welcome, but not enough, according to al-A'ghayde...
...walks briskly down these dusty streets checking on his men distributed across 30 checkpoints, he is joined by Colonel Abdel-Rida Shwaya of the Iraqi police's 7th Brigade. The young sheikh cuts a striking figure, clad in a crisp, white dishdasha and matching headdress. His weather-beaten face, his thick, black mustache and the tan bandolier draped across his chest give him the look of an Arabic Pancho Villa. Neither man knows if any of Dora's SOIs will be part of the 20% absorbed by the security forces. There are 300 more Sunni patrolmen than there are Iraqi...
...want to reduce the number of checkpoints," he says. "Do you want the Iraqi security forces and the Sahwa (SOIs) to remain on the streets 24 hours a day?" he asks Sheikh al-A'ghayde, who has stopped at an unusually sturdy-looking SOI checkpoint. Most are little more than flimsy wooden shacks reinforced with a few sheets of corrugated iron and propped up with several sandbags...