Thousands of men from India and Asia willing to risk their lives for low salaries in appalling conditions
From Phil Sands in Baghdad

IT was hot and sickly in the hospital room, as the American surgeon used an electric power saw to cut through a man's leg, halfway up the calf.

The left foot was already missing, amputated in a previous operation a few days earlier. But the raw stump - showing a flash of pure white bone - had become infected and more of the limb had to go. Anaesthetise, peel back the skin, slice through the shin, seal the wound. A routine 45-minute job, from start to finish.

Purna Bahadur came from the village of Palpa in the mountains of Nepal, just one man in a huge army of private contractors who have found work in Iraq. Thousands of men from India and Asia are among their number, earning modest salaries and working long hours in menial jobs. They cook, clean, wash clothes, drive lorries and empty toilets in support of a resource-hungry and over-stretched American military machine.

Bahadur, a 42-year-old father of two, was a security guard working for First Kuwait Construction on a project at the US embassy, in the heart of Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone. It was there that his leg was destroyed.

Although far from impervious to the country's violence, the Green Zone is a relatively safe posting. Mortar bombs would occasionally land nearby but Bahadur's four months in the Iraqi capital had been without dramatic incident. In fact, it was an industrial accident that led to the amputation: he was overseeing some building work in March when a lorry reversed onto his foot.

Immediately rushed to the American Army's front-line Casualty Support Hospital (CSH) in Baghdad, a US military surgeon decided amputation was necessary. The day after the operation, Bahadur was discharged and, rather than being returned to Kuwait and from there back to his home, near Katmandu, his employer took him to his living accommodation in the Green Zone.

Lying in his bed and cared for by First Kuwait Construction's medic, the crush wound quickly turned gangrenous, poison spreading up the limb. Five days after the first operation, he was readmitted to the CSH for the second.

"I borrowed a lot of money to pay an agent to get me this job and now my life is ruined," he said, waiting in the Intensive Care Unit between amputations. "I was going to pay back the loan and have some money left for my family. Now I don't know what will happen to me, or to them. I will not be able to work. I will not be able to pay the loan. I will lose everything."

Contractors in Iraq fall into two broad groups, the rich Westerners and the poor everyone else; usually Indians, Nepalese, Sri Lankans, Philippinos and Pakistanis. Western staff, whether hired guns, lorry drivers or engineers, are well paid. A British security guard can earn in the region of 1000 dollars a day. An American driver of one of the Green Zone's minibuses - they have a bus route to ferry soldiers and staff to and from the supermarket and their offices - said he was earning $150,000 a year with the US firm KBR, including paid holiday time.

For exactly the same job, a 31-year-old Asian, employed by a subcontractor to KBR, told the Sunday Herald he was paid less than $7000 annually. He was contracted to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week for two years without holiday. He shared a room with six other men, all employed under similar terms and conditions. Their meals were included. "In theory we are free to leave our job at any time but none of us can afford to - no one ever breaks their contract," he said, on condition of anonymity. Contracting firms working in Iraq tend to be extremely secretive and do not allow employees to talk to journalists.

According to the website Iraq Coalition Casualties, at least 393 contractors have been killed in the country, a number it acknowledges as "incomplete". Of those, 20 are Nepalese, seven Pakistani and eight Philippino. There is no total figure for how many contractors from Asia are working in Iraq, or how many have been wounded or lost their lives.

More recent figures - also incomplete - compiled by the US Department of Labour show that more than 770 civilian contractors working for American companies have lost their lives since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. A further 7761 are recorded as wounded.

KBR, holder of the largest department of defence contract covering the Middle East and Afghanistan, has revealed 99 of its employees have been killed at work, mainly in Iraq, where more than 50,000 people, including subcontractors, work under its auspices.

Prospective employees from Asia and India also have to pay agents and middlemen - often dubious underworld characters - in their home countries to get them into the jobs in the first place. Payments of about 150,000 rupees, equivalent to $3300, are typical. Although a huge sum compared to typical household incomes in India and Asia, families, especially in areas wracked by high unemployment, see the move as a sensible investment. If they can scrape together the upfront cash, they'll make a small profit in the long run.

A brief conversation with a Western contractor often reveals a bored ex-soldier or money hungry profiteer trying to pay for a holiday home, a swimming pool in the backyard, a new sports car or an expensive divorce settlement.

By contrast, Asian contractors earn a meagre living doing a difficult job far from home because they have few other options. They are often sole breadwinners for an extended family, not paying for luxuries or into pension schemes, but for necessities such as food, shelter and education.

Bahadur's salary was $1250 a month, enough for it to all make economic sense, as long as he could work out the two-year contract. He - as with all the others - paid the middleman, who then got him into one of the Gulf States. There, Bahadur met with his new employer, signed a contract and got shipped up to Iraq, another small piece in the multi-billion dollar business of war, occupation and reconstruction.

Speaking in Hindi, he quietly explained that he had gone through a mafia-like agent to get the job - not the kind of man who would forgive a debt. Flatly, matter-of-factly, he said: "I might as well be dead. Actually, it would have been better if I had died; it would be better for my family."

If a US soldier were to have his left leg amputated below the knee, after careful rehabilitation a high-tech graphite composite replacement lower limb would be fitted, costing up to $50,000. Some, with computerised knee joints, cost more than $100,000.

But Bahadur is not a US soldier. His immediate prospects, beyond the painful amputation, include no guarantees of a prosthetic. Even if one is made it will not be the advanced American type. And if, under his contract, he is entitled to any monetary compensation, most, or perhaps all of it, will probably be taken by the original agent in lieu of the loan repayments.

A female US Army nurse looking after Bahadur outlined the grim realities of taking employment in Iraq. "I see a lot of these kind of injuries in my line of work," she said, "and the truth is, if he were an American contractor he'd have been straight out of here and on a plane home and looked after.

"I don't know what he's going to do. When he leaves here, I suppose he's pretty much on his own."