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In Baqubah, 'Focus Is Aimed, Controlled Shooting'
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On the first day of the class, said Staff Sgt. Jeff Young, 27, of Lockhart, Tex., the instructors realized they had to separate Iraqi police officers and Iraqi army troops in the barracks because of animosity between the two groups. But after a few days, the rivalry dissipated.
Several Iraqis said in interviews that veterans of the old Iraqi army form the backbone of the new Iraqi army. Young said that at least one former soldier in the old Iraqi Republican Guard was in the class. The veterans are "the guys who take the lead," he said.
Sgt. 1st Class Muhammad Hussein Jasim, who emerged as the class leader, said he had spent 3 1/2 years in the old army. He has seen a lot of combat in his new unit, he said, but "not every day."
"About half were in the old army," agreed Pvt. Mahmood Jasim, including "more than half" of the sergeants and officers.
Cpl. Muhammad Agala, 22, said he had been in the new Iraqi army for only three months but had been given a higher rank because he had served in the old army. He added that he had been captured by coalition forces last year and spent 13 days in jail -- a matter, he explained, of simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"Everybody Iraqi," said Nassaf Jasim Muhammad, 32, a police officer. "There is no Sunni and Shia. We are all Muslim. All here, no problem." Later, he said that he is Sunni and is married to a Shiite woman.
"An Iraqi who can pick up on a dialect or say, 'Hey, that license plate's not from around here' " has skills that Americans simply don't have, Felt said as the exercise wound down. But he reiterated that besides instilling the values of a disciplined army, one of the most important skills the Iraqis worked on was the ability to pick and aim at a target, rather than firing the undisciplined shots that some U.S. troops here call "spray and pray."
"Fire control," he said. "That's one of the things they need a lot of work on."
