BAGHDAD — Tarik, a newly minted U.S. Army private first class, recalls his first challenge in Iraq: convincing fellow GIs he wasn't a terrorist.
The 24-year-old Morocco native was among the first graduates of a U.S. military program to provide Arabic-speaking "combat linguists" for American ground troops, one of the most precarious roles in the Iraq conflict.
During basic training at Ft. Jackson, S.C., scores of foreign-born recruits are warned that their backgrounds make them targets for Iraqi extremists who view them as traitors. But nobody warns them about the soldiers they're sent to assist.
In Iraq, some interpreters said, soldiers mocked their Arabic surnames and accused them of being "on the wrong side" of the conflict. Suspicious of his accent and dark features, some soldiers disdainfully labeled Tarik a hajji, a term of respect among Muslims that many American soldiers use with scorn.
The Boston resident felt like he was fighting two wars.
"I don't care what you think of me," he recalled telling fellow soldiers after arriving in Baghdad in April 2004. "I'm wearing this uniform. I'm just as much of an American soldier as you are."
The Army calls them 09 Limas -- military-speak for the linguist program. Answering recruitment ads, they volunteered to help fill the U.S. military's desperate need for speakers of Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Kurdish and other languages, often returning to the homes of their ancestors to do the job.
When the first 09 Limas landed in Iraq last year, they immediately bridged a cultural gap between U.S. soldiers and Iraqis.
On routine patrols in Baghdad or exploring possibly hostile desert towns, the 09 Limas try to fathom the wordless communication of hand and body gestures. On sweeps of suspected terrorists, they look for the often-subtle Arabic accents and dialects that can suggest a detainee's nationality and possible intent.
They also help defuse misunderstandings. One interpreter determined that documents found during a recent search of a Baghdad home were not weapons-smuggling blueprints, as U.S. soldiers suspected, but sewing patterns.
Although the need for native Arabic-speaking soldiers appears limitless in Iraq, let alone the rest of the Middle East, only 65 recruits have graduated from the 17-week program. Officials plan to send 100 more in the next year.
"Without them," an Army commander in Baghdad wrote in an e-mail, "my men and I could not do two-thirds of our mission."
