“Camp Freedom” is a converted Soviet-era base at Tasz?r near Kaposvar, where the U.S. military trained an exile militia known as the “Free Iraqi Forces” and where it reportedly plans to train another 28,000 Iraqi “policemen.” The Tasz?r base resembles a high-security prison, and local authorities say they don’t know anything about what actually goes on inside the base.
Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner who heads the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad, told The New York Times that he hoped to begin training Iraqis at Tasz?r within a few months. Kerik said the courses in Hungary would be short and intensive, lasting about eight weeks.
When U.S. officials said they were holding talks with Hungary about training up to 28,000 Iraqi police officers at Tasz?r, the local authorities only learned of the plan when the Hungarian press picked up the story.
Karoly Szita, the mayor of Kaposvar, told the Hungarian press that it was “the same game” the U.S. had played earlier in the year when “nobody knew anything.” The exiles then were said to be training as interpreters for U.S. forces, but “were armed, in uniform, and being put through combat training,” The Guardian (UK) reported recently.
European press reports allege that the former Iraqi chief of staff and high-profile defector Gen. Nizar al-Khazraji, who mysteriously vanished on March 17 from Denmark where he was under house arrest, was snatched by the CIA and taken to Tasz?r, where he is helping the Americans train the new Iraqi forces.
Al-Khazraji, who was suspected of war crimes against Iraqi Kurds was under a court order to remain in Denmark, where he defected in 1999.
Danish reporter Arne Moeller said that CIA agents shepherded Khazraji out of Denmark to help with the war against Saddam: “All the witnesses told our newspaper that he left in a black car heading to the south of Denmark,” Moeller said. A Gulfstream aircraft “was ready to take off and two members of the CIA put him on board.”
American company Brown and Root Services, a subsidiary of Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) and its Dallas-based parent company Halliburton Corp., is running operations at the base from its fortress-like headquarters in Kaposvar. Brown and Root employees are forbidden from discussing what they do and see at the base. Local authorities say, “I don’t know” and add they are not allowed to discuss activities related to the base.

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