THE ARMY is facing such a critical shortage of Arabic translators and interpreters in Iraq that it has had to recruit university undergraduates to fill the gaps.

Some students are even suspending their degrees in order to take up the £200-a-day posts.

Laura Culley, 21, a student at Exeter University, is being paid to work alongside military staff during a five-month contract in Basra, in southern Iraq, where the British forces are based.

Ms Culley, who was studying Arabic at the university’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, agreed to suspend her degree after being approached by recruiters working for the Ministry of Defence.

She is one of two woman from Exeter who, together with a number of recent Arabic graduates from other British universities, were flown at short notice into the former war zone of southern Iraq.

Based at Basra International Airport, they are translating and interpreting both written and spoken Arabic.

Ms Culley, from Weymouth, Dorset, was in the final year of her degree at Exeter when she was contacted shortly before Christmas by Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), a subsidiary of the US multinational Halliburton, a civilian contractor working for the MoD. After a brief assessment of her language skills, she was offered the contract and flew to Iraq last month. Her daily pay includes danger money.

An added incentive for Miss Culley was her fiancé, Captain James Marshall of the Royal Logistic Corps, being stationed near her base in Basra. The couple are due to be married in June.

Her father, Andrew Culley, a police officer, said yesterday that he and his wife, Annette, were proud of their only daughter, who has A levels in English, PE and German and knew no Arabic before she started her degree course.

“She has always been extremely independent-minded and she has effectively taken a gap year to work for the military in Iraq,” he said.

“They are obviously quite desperate for Arabic speakers over there, but she’s enjoying it immensely and her lan- guage skills are increasing enormously.”

The MoD began recruiting university students last October. It was forced to turn to universities for Arabic speakers for Operation Telic, codename for the British military operation in Iraq, because it became impossible to meet the demand for interpreters.

Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Rabbitt, commanding officer of the Defence School of Languages at Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, told The Times that between 15 and 20 university graduates with degrees in Arabic had been recruited since last November to “fill a gap” in the demand. The MoD said that five of those were deployed in Iraq.

The Defence School has already tripled the number of places on its Arabic course and is now turning out between

30 and 40 “high-level” Arabic speakers each year. Many of them are deployed to Iraq or elsewhere in the Gulf as military interpreters.

In addition, Colonel Rabbitt said, since he took command of the school in March last year, about a thousand members of the Armed Forces had taken a ten-week “low-level” Arabic course, to familiarise themselves with Islamic culture and learn basic language skills.

Civilian recruits are assessed at Westminster University before being sent to the Defence School, where they receive lessons in how to behave in an Arab nation.

They also get a crash course in military jargon. “This is to make sure they know the difference between a tank and a fish tank, and what it means when you talk about armoured cars. Some people think an armoured car is what the Pope is driven around in,” Colonel Rabbitt said.

To help the recruited university students and the military personnel assigned to Operation Telic, the defence school now has Iraqi nationals on the staff who provide a condensed course in the dialects the students will have to grapple with when they arrive in Basra.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said that it had 13 Arabic speakers who are currently working in Iraq.

One of Miss Culley’s professors at Exeter, Rasheed El- Enany, said that the Army’s recruitment of its two undergraduates highlighted Britain’s dearth of Arabic graduates.

“The Government is not doing enough to help. Minority languages such as Arabic have been neglected for a long time and we need more resources to recruit more students on to more courses,” he said.

Eleven British universities offer undergraduate degree courses in Arabic and although there are currently 737 postgraduate students, only 12 of those who received funding for their studies were British.

In stark contrast, America’s first elementary school requiring students to learn Arabic will open in Atlanta this summer and 10,584 university students enrolled on Arabic courses this year.

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