What Iraqi soldiers?

last updated 8 January 2015

Budapest

Hungarian officials said this week they were surprised to read a newspaper account that they had agreed to host 28,000 Iraqis for police training. Former New York police chief Bernard Kerik, who now heads up Iraq’s Interior Ministry, told The New York Times that Budapest had given the U.S. permission to set up the police academy at a former Soviet base in southern Hungary. Kerik said the eight-week training course for the first group of 1,500 Iraqis would start in four months. But Foreign Ministry spokesman Tamas Toth told the Hungarian media that there had been only informal discussions about training Iraqis and that nothing was final. The Hungarian government is willing to discuss the training program, Toth said, but it has concerns about security.