Pushing Boulders and Sleeping on Cardboard: A Story of Trafficking in Iraq

A shorter version of this article first appeared on IraqSlogger.

Ramil Autencio dreamed of making a better life in the Philippines for himself and his young family with the promise of a good-paying job in Kuwait. He never suspected that weeks after leaving home in December 2003 he would be living a wartime nightmare in northern Iraq, pushing boulders 11 hours a day, seven days a week for a contractor fortifying a U.S. military camp in Tikrit.

Showers to wash off the day's sweat were an uncertainty, and in the chilly January and February nights of 2004, he and seven other Filipinos would live in an empty truck container with no windows, sleep on cardboard boxes for a bed, and eat leftovers and ready-to-eat meals from soldiers. It was the only way to get enough food. Crackling gunfire and crashing incoming mortar would wake them at all hours of the night and the unfortified trailer would tremble and shake from nearby rocket blasts.

It was not what he had planned at all.

Hoping to earn $450 a month

Trained as an air conditioning repairman and technician, Autencio says his recruiter in the Philippines agreed to place him in a two-year job at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Kuwait for $450 a month -- maybe more with overtime. But after arriving at the Kuwait airport, he was quickly shuttled to a rundown apartment building managed by First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting, a Kuwaiti firm doing a booming multimillion-dollar business with the U.S. military and the Pentagon's primary support contractor KBR.

To date, the company has billed the U.S. government perhaps $2 billion for work in Iraq, including the $592 million U.S. embassy in Baghdad now nearing completion.

There were no more jobs at the hotel, Autencio was informed, and because the job recruiter had processed him for only a one-month travel visa, he could not work in Kuwait. Autencio said First Kuwaiti offered him one of three options: pay a $1,000 penalty and work unpaid in Kuwait for six months, be arrested and jailed, or work in Iraq. As he weighed these choices, he would live in the dilapidated apartment building with 800 other Filipinos, where, at first, there were no mattresses or blankets. They ate only small pieces of chicken and rice under the building's crumbling ceilings.

"A jail would be better," Autencio recalled. "We were ordered to go. ... They forcibly brought us to Iraq."

Former supervisors with First Kuwaiti who have since left the company call the three-story building Jaleeb.

"They would lock them in without documents -- no passports or IDs," recalled one longtime supervisor. "The building was so crowded, you could barely breathe." Many say one Filipino lost his mind and died while Autencio was there.

Another supervisor agreed the building was "a mess" and said, after much urging, it was cleaned up sometime in 2006.

First Kuwaiti's general manager, Wadih Al-Absi consistently denies that his company would ever endorse such recruitment practices. During numerous conversations, he has said that First Kuwaiti never pressured workers into Iraq or violated international visa requirements. During one meeting in Washington, D.C., in September 2005, he said that people were envious of his company's success. "People will never criticize someone who fails," he said.

Al-Absi also flatly accused Autencio of lying. His proof is a working agreement, purportedly signed by Autencio before leaving the Philippines. Although Al-Absi admitted that unscrupulous recruitment agencies do sometimes misrepresent jobs and take money from people eager to work, he provided Autencio's undated contract with First Kuwaiti, which identified the job site as Kuwait and "mainly" Iraq.

The agreement also lays out salary: $346 a month for eight-hour days, seven days a week, plus $104 a month for a mandatory two hours overtime every day.