British workers quit as risk outweighs reward

Sandy Thompson, 44, a father of two, said his friends questioned his sanity when he answered an advert for an electrical contractor in Baghdad. But his marriage had broken down, he had lost his job in Glasgow and desperately needed the money. The carefully-worded short-term contract with a Dubai firm promised an equivalent £60,000 salary and a £100,000 life insurance policy, with luxury housing and round-the-clock protection from former special forces soldiers. But when he and another Briton arrived, they were put in a villa near al-Mansour Street with 13 other men, sharing two bathrooms and guarded by two locals armed with Kalishnikov rifles.

He and his colleague had to sleep on children’s bunk beds and for two months his salary did not appear in an offshore bank account. When it was paid in, it was only £2,500 a month. After irate and expensive telephone calls to his employers in Dubai Mr Thompson was told: “If you added the tax that would be taken in Britain, it did come to roughly £60,000 a year.”

Diplomats cannot check on all the Britons still working in Iraq, but estimate that about 2,300 have signed up as bodyguards with private security companies and probably fewer than a thousand work for commercial contractors. That number has dwindled in the past month after the rash of abductions.

When Mr Thompson was shot at on the drive to a power plant north of the capital, he decided to take the next flight out. “Security was a joke, and frankly, for all the big talk about the money, most people weren’t getting that much” he said. “All you would do is work incredibly long hours, mainly because there is nothing else to do.”

To break the boredom most workers try to get invitations to the green zone, where embassy staff and the major contractors have accommodation behind barbed wire and columns of US tanks.

Westerners with companies that do not have the power to get them billeted there tend to congregate in the same part of the city where yesterday’s kidnap happened. A Frenchwoman who lives close by said: “I have the feeling that the gunmen have combed the whole of Baghdad and know exactly where foreigners live.”

There are pages of adverts in Gulf newpapers for jobs in Iraq — from dry cleaning to hairdressing. But contractors admit that fewer Britons and Americans are applying. “The vast majority are divorced or separated. There are a few thrill seekers but nobody stays for long,” Mr Thompson said.

Salaries dropping in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq is a better paid if far less attractive alternative.

Many Britons say they first heard of jobs going in Baghdad from friends already there. The Pentagon is investigating claims that some staff handling multimillion contracts were recruited by e-mail with no interviews or security vetting.

One attraction for British applicants, Mr Thompson said, was that “while at home they get their hands dirty in Iraq they would be the boss”.

Living conditions are often appalling and security non-existent for workers recruited from South East Asia and the Indian sub-continent, who often do not know they have signed up to work in Iraq.

The South Koreans kidnapped recently thought that they had got jobs in Jordan, but then found themselves being driven across the desert to Baghdad.

Some ex-servicemen who signed up as bodyguards with newly formed security companies based in the Gulf have also quit their posts. They did so because they were housed in poorly protected villas in Baghdad and were not paid as much as they were originally promised.