The source who attended the meeting also said that some of the judgments made by senior military commanders were not based on accurate information. For example, he said, the military leaders would send a certain battalion somewhere to fight but in reality half of the battalion would be missing – which meant that there were far fewer soldiers fighting than their commanders thought.
This phenomenon – where soldiers are not present within their assigned units – is not a new one in the Iraqi military. Many soldiers bribe their way out of danger zones, paying a hefty part or all of their salary to their superior officers in return for the superior not reporting them absent. Locally, these absent soldiers are known as “astronauts”, in that they are floating around elsewhere and not involved in real life in Iraq’s military. And recently there have been more and more astronauts, mainly due to soldiers’ concerns about gains made by the IS group.
“The astronaut phenomenon is destroying the Iraqi army,” one officer, Kadhim al-Shammari, told NIQASH. “There are senior officers who are making deals with dozens of their men, giving them vacations for months in return for part or all of the men’s salaries.”
Abbas al-Saadi is a soldier and by rights he should be stationed near Tikrit, where his unit is involved fighting the IS group. But instead he works as a taxi driver.
“If I was killed, who would look after my wife and three children?” he asks. “I love the military but I am worried about the IS group. They not only kill soldiers in battle, they behead them and burn them. That’s why I decided to give all of my salary to the officer in charge of our unit so that he would register me absent with leave.”
Al-Saadi makes his living by driving a taxi while his salary goes to his military senior. Soldiers like him say they will return to duty but that they are just waiting for their units to be shifted into other, less dangerous areas before they do.
According to the Parliamentary committee on security and defence there are thousands of soldiers like al-Saadi. Astronaut soldiers also include the men who escaped during raids or battles with the IS group and other forces, and then never returned to their units. They went home instead.
“A military unit should number 500 men but instead the astronaut phenomenon might mean that it only numbers 300,” says al-Shammari. “This means that the workload on other soldiers increases and that they have less vacation time and more responsibility.”
How can Iraq even let those Cowards breath the same air that they breath they might as well be fighting with Isisl no regards for women or children. These are the men that stay behind and rape the women and complain that the Iraq government is not doing enough and to make matters worse they take the money that families can use to live off and give it to the worthless officers not to fight forgive me and may God have mercy on the Iraqi people because the men sure won't .