U.S. Miscounted Iraqi Volunteer Guards

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U.S. Miscounted Iraqi Volunteer Guards
Associated Press | November 30, 2007

American military officials have discovered there are fewer Iraqi civilians serving as volunteer guards in their home areas than it had thought, saying accounting mistakes had inflated the number by thousands.

Senior military officers said they had reduced the nationwide total from 77,000 to 60,321 - most of them Sunni Arabs.

The officers also expressed impatience with the Shiite-dominated government's failure to fully embrace the U.S.-backed home guard program and warned that the armed men could "drift back toward violence" if they aren't put to work.

Officials said the 22 percent discrepancy in guard numbers came about because not all Iraqis recorded as enlisting to protect towns against extremists had been accepted into the "concerned local citizens" program, which has been credited with helping curb violence.

Col. Martin Stanton of the military's reconciliation and engagement office said he detected the discrepancy during an audit that found 17,000 people previously listed on the rolls "were not standing post as a volunteer."

He said the mistake occurred because the military divisions overseeing different parts of Iraq did not have a proper definition of who should be included on the list. The largest decline was in northern Iraq, where the total was reduced by more than 10,000.


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,157285,00.html