"Exactly how many Americans are serving in Iraq and what they are doing there might not seem complicated questions. Stories in the media regularly talk about the 150,000 U.S. military personnel in the Iraq theater. Coverage of events inside Iraq, which includes the actions of U.S. troops there, was the third-biggest news story in the U.S. media for the first quarter of 2007, according to PEJ research.
But those numbers do not include coverage of some 30,000 employees of U.S. and European-based Private Security Companies (PSCs), who work in some of Iraq's most dangerous areas.
These PSC employees are not like other contractors in Iraq. Many of them carry weapons and are hired to protect important people, facilities and convoys. They have been involved in firefights and scores of them, the exact number is unclear, have perished. Yet there are many basic unanswered questions about these armed forces, which augment by 20% the number of foreign troops in the country. " Source: Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism.
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