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Marine spearheads Iraqi army recruiting program

Capt. Jose M. Acevedo has spent a lot of time in Iraq — recruiting others to fight.

Between August 2007 and August 2008, Acevedo spearheaded a program to bring mobile recruiting stations to all corners of Iraq, something he said helped those in remote areas enlist and provided an opportunity to showcase a newer, more professional Iraqi army.

The effort paid off. In a year’s time, the units Acevedo led recruited about 60,000 Iraqis, a Marine spokesman said. And Acevedo is at it again, with his sights on 6,000 more recruits in October.

“The aggressive recruiting has actually given the populace a lot of confidence in the Iraqi army,” Acevedo said. “It showed them [that the Iraqi soldiers] were there to take care of them.”

The efforts were part of a joint advisory program between Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq and the Iraqi army.

The benefits and goals of the program have been two-fold, he said. It bolstered the ranks of the Iraqi army, allowing the Iraqi government to assume more authority, and it showcased an ethnically diverse military in the face of sectarian violence.

At one drive, Acevedo described a security detail of privates that included Kurds, Shia and Sunni Muslims, and an Iraqi Christian.

“When you see [cooperation] at that lowest level, you know improvements have been made,” he said.

In the town of Al Qa’im, near the Syrian border, he said more than 650 people signed up during a drive, giving him a sense of accomplishment.

“The [Iraqi] battalion commander was almost in tears to see that the local populace in the town he was protecting were joining,” Acevedo said. “You could see hope in [applicants’] eyes, that they were going to have jobs and a future. They were tired of the violence, and they wanted to do something about it.”

Acevedo is hoping to eventually take his experience to Afghanistan. Plans for mobile recruiting stations are “on the drawing board” as Marine leadership tries to determine how to apply lessons learned in Iraq to Afghanistan’s culture and circumstance, he said.

“As a Marine, I would love to [go there],” he said.