Babakir is one of about 500 young cadets who now march across the sprawling campus a few miles from the Turkish border in the relatively peaceful Kurdistan region of Iraq. There, recruits train to be army officers away from the threats of mortar fire and sectarian killings that plague their hometowns to the south. 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.”
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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.
