Security-minded Iraqis avoid U.S. embassy jobs

"The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is finding it increasingly difficult to get local Iraqis to work there because of what one senior official at the embassy called the 'precarious security situation' in the country.
Last year, 35 local employees resigned, 'nearly all due to security issues,' the official said. The State Department is authorized to hire 136 local people for jobs in the embassy, but right now only 47 are filled by Iraqis. Thirteen more are filled by Jordanians brought over in a program specifically set up to fill the chronic gap.
. . . So the plan now is to provide additional benefits -- housing and meals, more vacation, more health benefits and other inducements -- to entice local people hired at embassies in the region and even elsewhere in the world who might be willing to work in Iraq on six-month rotations. There is talk of figuring out ways to hire retired embassy employees from the region to come back in and work in Baghdad as contractors.
The long-term hope is to hire Iraqis for these jobs, but given the chaos and insecurity in Baghdad these days, nobody's counting on that option."

By Washington Post columnist Al Kamen

source
Kamen, Al. (The Washington Post). Wanted: A Few Good Iraqis. Or Jordanians. Or . . . Anybody? February 12, 2007.

posted: tuesday, february 13, 2007, 7:07 PM ET

tags: iraq jobs

Pentagon group is targeting Iraqi unemployment

"Members of a small Pentagon task force have gone to the most dangerous areas of Iraq over the past six months to bring life to nearly 200 state-owned factories abandoned by the Coalition Provisional Authority after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Their goal is to employ tens of thousands of Iraqis in coming months, part of a plan to reduce soaring unemployment and lessen the violence that has crippled progress.
Defense officials and military commanders say that festering unemployment -- at 70 percent in some areas -- is leading Iraqi men to take cash from insurgents to place bombs on roads or take shots at U.S. troops. Other Iraqis are joining sectarian attacks because their quality of life has slipped dramatically, officials say.
Army Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the top U.S. field commander in Iraq, said that tackling unemployment could do far more good than adding U.S. combat troops or more aggressively pursuing an elusive enemy."

source
The Washington Post. To Stem Iraqi Violence, U.S. Aims to Create Jobs. December 12, 2006.

posting: thursday, december 14, 2006, 4:00 PM ET