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U.S. Seeking To Recruit Arab Nationals For Special Forces

The U.S. Army, including its special forces, are suffering from an acute shortage of foreign language specialists, particularly those fluent in Gulf region languages

WASHINGTON, October 13 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – After making use of the Northern Alliance in it’s war in Afghanistan to topple the Taliban government, the U.S. special forces is now considering recruiting foreign nationals, including Arabic-speaking citizens of Middle Eastern countries, for combat missions overseas.

This comes as Washington prepares for possible military action against Iraq, a defense official said Saturday, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"That's an initiative that we are looking at," Major Gary Kolb, spokesman for Army special operations, told AFP in a telephone interview from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. "We have not determined any specifics yet."
Under current regulations, only U.S. citizens can serve in the Green Berets, the Delta Force and other elite U.S. special forces units that are often tasked with carrying out the most sensitive military missions abroad.

But the U.S. Army, including its special forces, are suffering from an acute shortage of foreign language specialists, particularly those fluent in Arabic as well as Central Asian and Gulf region languages.

As many as 50 percent of Army vacancies for Arabic language experts and 68 percent for those proficient in Farsi, which is spoken in Iran, remained vacant earlier this year, according to a report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress.

Since the project was still at a very early stage, Kolb said, no decision has been made as to what specific foreign nationals the special forces would be trying to recruit.

But he made clear that when all the necessary approvals were collected, Middle Easterners would be among them.
"It's much better to work with someone who has grown up in a country than just an expert," the spokesman said. "Language is a part of it, but it's also the whole culture issue."

Special forces troops have been widely used in Afghanistan on reconnaissance missions, identifying targets and calling in air strikes, pursuing al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives and searching for caches of weapons.

According to military experts, they are certain to be widely used in any possible U.S. military operation against Iraq.

But defense officials have privately complained that the Afghan campaign has also revealed the limited ability of American-born soldiers to blend into local society and maintain their cover.

It will take an act of the U.S. Congress to allow foreign nationals to join these secretive strike teams, said Kolb, adding that no top Pentagon official has yet reviewed the proposal.

However, the U.S. military already has experience in recruiting foreigners for some of its most sensitive operations overseas.

At the height of the Cold War, Congress passed the so-called Lodge Act of 1950, which authorized the Army to recruit 12,000 alien nationals outside of the United States in exchange for citizenship after five years of service.

The statute was used to recruit dozens of Eastern Europeans to create special forces teams that could be dropped behind the Iron Curtain to sabotage Soviet supply lines and organize anti-Communist guerrilla movements, according to military historians.

There is no evidence the units have ever actually been deployed. As the United States gears up for a possible war with Iraq, the Defense Department also confirmed Saturday it was repositioning some of its military forces in support of the president's effort "to identify, locate and hold accountable terrorists and those who support and harbor them."

Following the September 11 strikes in the U.S. the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) announced vacancies for individuals able to read and translate Arabic, Dari, Pashto into English.

In November, 2001, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a program to reward foreigners in the United States who provide information on terrorism with help in getting visas and eventual U.S. citizenship.
In an interview with NBC television, Ashcroft described a new "Responsible Cooperators Program," designed to encourage people to provide information that "helps to save American lives."

"Obviously, we think it's the responsibility of all people to cooperate in the fight against terror," he said. "For individuals who are visitors in this country, sometimes they might be in possession of information because of their language skills, or because of what they know from at home that might be especially valuable to us."

Ashcroft declined to call the new program an amnesty for illegal aliens, but said, "if they bring information forward, they're not going to be inquired of about their own status."

"We're interested in helping them with their visas in the United States," he said. "This is a program to give them improved standing in processing visas and becoming citizens ultimately someday."

In a CNN report, Ashcroft said that if a person brought "reliable" and "useful" information to the FBI or, if overseas, to an embassy, "you could, as a result of that information, be provided a visa which will allow you to be in the United States, allow you if necessary to work in the United States and provide a basis for your someday becoming a citizen."