Use of contractors in Iraq could grow as US forces shrink

It was early in the Iraq war, Dec. 22, 2004, and the shots came not from insurgents or criminals. They were fired by workers for a US private security company, Custer Battles, according to an incident report in an archive of more than 300,000 classified military documents made public by WikiLeaks.

The company’s convoy sped south in Umm Qasr, a grubby port city near the Persian Gulf. The men in it shot out the tire of a civilian car that came close. They fired five shots into a crowded minibus. The shooting stopped only after the Iraqi police, port security, and a British military unit finally caught up with the convoy.

Somehow no one had been hurt, and the contractors found a quick way to prevent messy disciplinary action. They handed out cash to Iraqi civilians and left.

The documents sketch, in vivid detail, a critical change in the way America wages war: the early days of the Iraq war, with all its Wild West chaos, ushered in the era of the private contractor, wearing no uniform but fighting and dying in battle, gathering and disseminating intelligence, and killing presumed insurgents.

There have been many abuses, including civilian deaths, to the point that the Afghan government is working to ban many outside contractors entirely.

The use of security contractors is expected to grow as US forces shrink. A July report by the Commission on Wartime Contracting, a panel established by Congress, estimated that the State Department alone would need more than double the number of contractors it had protecting the US Embassy and consulates in Iraq.

Contractors were necessary at the start of the Iraq war because there simply were not enough soldiers. In 2004, their presence became the symbol for Iraq’s descent into chaos, when four contractors were killed in Fallujah.

Even now — with many contractors discredited for unjustified shootings and a lack of accountability described in the documents — the military cannot do without them. There are more contractors than military forces serving in Afghanistan.

The archive, which describes many episodes never made public in detail, shows the multitude of shortcomings with this new system: how a failure to coordinate among contractors, coalition forces, and Iraqi troops, as well as a failure to enforce rules of engagement that bind the military, endangered civilians as well as the contractors themselves. The military was often outright hostile to contractors for being amateurish, overpaid, and often trigger-happy.

Contractors often shot with little discrimination — and few, if any, consequences — at unarmed civilians, Iraqi security forces, US troops, and even other contractors, stirring outrage and undermining much of what coalition forces were sent to accomplish.

For all the contractors’ bravado — Iraq was packed with beefy men with beards and flak jackets — and for all the debates about their necessity, it is clear from the documents that the contractors appeared notably ineffective at keeping themselves and the people they were paid to protect from being killed.

In fact, the documents seem to confirm a common observation on the ground during those years: far from providing insurance against sudden death, the easily identifiable, surprisingly vulnerable pickup trucks and SUVs driven by the security companies were magnets for insurgents, militias, disgruntled Iraqis, and anyone else in search of a target.

Most of the documents are incident reports and match what is known of the few cases that have been made public, though even this cache is unlikely to be a complete record of incidents involving contractors. During the six years covered by the reports, at least 175 private security workers were killed. The peak appeared to come in 2006, when 53 died. Insurgents and other malefactors kidnapped at least 70 contractors, many of whom were killed.

Aegis, a British security company, had the most workers reported killed, more than 30. Most of those were Iraqi drivers, guards, and other employees. Not only the military, but journalists and aid workers as well relied on contractors to help protect them.

The threats were not limited to insurgents, the documents show: private security contractors repeatedly came under fire from Iraqi and coalition security forces, who often seemed unnerved by unmarked vehicles approaching at high speeds and fired warning shots, or worse. As the war dragged on, there seemed no universal method for the military to identify these quasi-soldiers.