{"id":56776,"date":"2014-12-01T12:03:20","date_gmt":"2014-12-01T17:03:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=56776"},"modified":"2014-12-01T12:03:20","modified_gmt":"2014-12-01T17:03:20","slug":"iraqis-paying-50000-ghost-troops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=56776","title":{"rendered":"Iraqis paying 50,000 “ghost troops”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andy11M and Paul sent us links to BBC<\/a> which reports that the Iraqi Army is paying about 50,000 people on their payroll who don’t exist;<\/p>\n

Known in the military as “ghost soldiers”, they either did not exist or no longer reported for duty, however their salaries were still paid.<\/p>\n

A statement from the PM’s office said the payments have been stopped.<\/p>\n

Correspondents say rampant corruption in the Iraqi army is seen as one of the reasons why it has struggled to contain Islamic State militants.<\/p>\n

A spokesman for Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi, quoted by AFP news agency, said the investigation began when the latest salary payments were made.<\/p>\n

“Over the past few weeks, the prime minister has been cracking down to expose the ghost soldiers and get to the root of the problem,” said Rafid Jaboori.<\/p>\n

It is thought that the salaries were siphoned off by corrupt officers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, I’m sure they’ll be able to grease some palms to make the investigation go away. 50,000 trigger pullers might help in the war against ISIS, though. <\/p>\n

From the Washington Post;<\/p>\n

With entry-level soldiers in Iraq drawing salaries of about $600 a month, the practice of \u201cghost soldiers\u201d is likely to be costing Iraq at least $380 million a year \u2014 though officials say that\u2019s probably only a fraction of the true expense.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

OK, this is not my shocked face, if you’re wondering, in discovering Iraqis taking advantage of their government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andy11M and Paul sent us links to BBC which reports that the Iraqi Army is paying … Iraqis paying 50,000 “ghost troops”<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56776\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}