“You have a situation where the government has become dependent on contractors,” Allison Stanger, a political-science professor at Middlebury College, told WSJ. “It's a real quantum shift.”

“The military task has, in fact, been outsourced in Iraq,” confirmed analyst Steven Schooner, a professor at George Washington University Law School.

Washington’s relationship with Baghdad has undergone a major transformation. Officially, the US has just several hundred troops in Iraq and the US Defense Department does not contract private security companies to operate in Iraq.

Yet the major shift in US-Iraq relations now is that Washington is no longer allocating budget money on operations in Iraq. It is Baghdad that spends money on American weaponry, vehicles and equipment, while American defense companies are earning money in Iraq by placing military contractors there.

Private defense companies, such as Triple Canopy and Dyncorp International, have multibillion contracts in Iraq for years to come.

Washington is actively assisting the Iraqi government in fighting terrorism, supplying Baghdad with drones and is considering training some of the country’s elite military forces in neighboring Jordan.

An assault operation against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a faction of Al-Qaeda currently occupying Fallujah, is promising to be a serious undertaking implying the use of the utmost in firepower, so Baghdad is buying $6 billion worth of military equipment from the US, including 24 Apache attack helicopters and nearly 500 Hellfire missiles.

A group of top US lawmakers attempted to block the Apache deal, expressing concerns that providing Iraq with helicopters and other arms to help battle Al-Qaeda, would also mean that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki might use them against his rivals. But the deal has nevertheless been finalized and the first batch of helicopters is expected in Iraq soon, along with the Hellfire missiles. This also means that 200 more contractors will come to Iraq to ensure the helicopters operate properly.

In the meantime violence in Iraq is at a record high. Al-Qaeda militants are advancing in the country’s south and are staging regular terror acts. It seems the Iraqi government has little choice but to come down on the insurgency with deadly force.

History repeats itself

It is probably no exaggeration to say that the war in Iraq is as far from being over as it was in 2003, with two major differences though. First: in the absence of Saddam Hussein his troops have been replaced with Al-Qaeda mujahedeen. Second: the US regular army has been supplanted by thousands of contractors, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The rest remains the same: English-speaking mercenaries are expected to choreograph the storming of Iraqi cities defended by Arab-speaking fighters of Al-Qaeda, exactly as it was back in 2004 during the Battle of Fallujah. Today Fallujah, occupied by Al-Qaeda, remains the primary target for the Iraqi government forces to assault backed by mercenaries.

US troops entered Iraq in 2003 and officially withdrew from the country in 2011. At the peak of war there were 157,800 American military personnel in Iraq.

Pentagon spokesman, Navy Commander Bill Speaks, reported that there are only 250 American troops in Iraq. These servicemen are either advisers assigned to the Office of Security Cooperation overseeing the US military interaction with Iraqi national forces, or Marine Corps security guards securing US diplomatic facilities.

After the withdrawal of the US troops from Iraq, the duty of protecting US interests in the country was relegated to thousands of contractors from the US Defense Ministry and other security agencies.

According to the US State Department and Pentagon, it is estimated there were over 12,500 contractors in Iraq, working for the US government as of January 2013. By October, according to a quarterly report, their number had decreased to 6,624 specialists. Less than a quarter of them (1,626) were American citizens, the rest were Iraqis (2,191), with 2,807 civilian experts from foreign countries.

Bill Speaks said that the last major US Defense Department contract in Iraq ended on December 15 and now there are zero contractors in Iraq hired by the US Defense Department.

Where did all those contractors go? They are still in Iraq, maintains the Foreign Policy magazine.

The FP asked Triple Canopy, a huge private defense company and sanctuary for the US Special Forces veterans, for details and learnt that “Recently all US government agencies have reduced their reliance on contractors due to budget cuts and have de-scoped contracts across the board, including in Iraq,” the company said a statement.

“Contractors will continue to remain engaged in Iraq in the near future. However, the majority of these personnel will likely be working on commercial extractive and construction projects,” the company said.

Contractors from America's biggest defense companies are providing maintenance for the equipment and vehicles previously bought by the Iraqi government from the US, such as helicopters, C-130 transport aircrafts, surveillance planes, drones, communication equipment and more.

Over the years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan there have been multiple cases of contracting fraud.

The US Congress’ Independent Commission on Wartime Contracting determined that at least $31 billion in US funding had been wasted due to “poor oversight, fraud, waste, and abuse,” said FP’s former US Representative, Christopher Shays, who used co-chair the Commission.

The US has allegedly spent over $200 billion on contractors in both Afghanistan and Iraq over the last decade. Now that the US administration has transferred these expenditures to the Iraqi government, the American military industrial complex and private security companies are ready to make a fortune in Iraq.

A trial in the nearly 7-year-old case is scheduled to begin with jury selection on Wednesday, barring last-minute legal developments. Prosecutors plan to call dozens of Iraqis to testify in what the Justice Department says is likely to be the largest group of foreign witnesses ever to travel to the U.S. to participate in a criminal trial.

The violence at the Nisoor Square traffic circle in downtown Baghdad was the darkest episode of contractor violence during the war in Iraq, becoming one more diplomatic disaster in a war that had many. Iraqi officials, who wanted the guards tried in a local court, were outraged.

In the trial, defense lawyers will focus on the guards’ state of mind in a city that was a battleground.

Car bombs and insurgents were daily perils for the Blackwater teams. As part of its work with the State Department, Blackwater had a team of 15 intelligence analysts who produced daily threat updates, colored maps of a city riddled with bomb blasts.

“The core disputed issue in this prosecution is self-defense — whether the defendants believed that deadly force was necessary to defend themselves and their teammates from an insurgent attack, and whether that belief was objectively reasonable,” lawyers for the guards said in court filings.

Reasonableness shouldn’t be judged on “hindsight analysis in a courtroom seven years and thousands of miles removed from the event,” the lawyers argue in the filings.

In the aftermath of the shootings, Blackwater Worldwide provided the government with photos of the guards’ vehicles pocked and streaked with bullet marks.

On Capitol Hill, one theme in politically tinged congressional hearings was that hiring large numbers of security guards, and letting them operate outside the military chain of command in a war zone, was a recipe for disaster.

Blackwater founder Erik Prince declared: “I believe we acted appropriately at all times.” The Nisoor Square shootings spelled the death knell for his company. Formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide, the company is under new ownership, is based in Virginia and Prince is no longer affiliated with it. The company was sold to a group of investors who changed the name to Academi.

The very presence of security guards in Iraq is touchy. Lawyers for the guards had asked that current or former members of the military not wear uniforms when they testify in the case, a request the court denied. The guards’ lawyers argued that distinctions between contractors and uniformed military had become highly politicized.

In 2009, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina dismissed the case against the Blackwater guards. From the Iraqi government’s perspective, the dismissal was an example of Americans acting above the law. Urbina said government lawyers ignored the advice of senior Justice Department officials by building the criminal case on sworn statements of the guards given under a grant of immunity — meaning the guards’ own statements could not be used against them.

Two years later, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit revived the prosecution, ruling that Urbina had wrongly interpreted the law. The decision gave the Justice Department another chance.

In the upcoming trial, one of the guards, Nicholas Slatten, is charged with first-degree murder. The other three guards — Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard — are charged with voluntary manslaughter, attempted manslaughter and gun charges. Slatten could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted, while the other guards face a mandatory minimum penalty of 30 years in prison if a defendant is convicted of the gun charge and at least one other charge.

Last September, prosecutors agreed to dismiss their case against a fifth guard, Donald Ball, a retired Marine from West Valley City, Utah. A sixth guard, Jeremy Ridgeway of California, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and attempted manslaughter, is expected to testify for the prosecution and is awaiting sentencing.

On the day of the shootings, a car bomb exploded in downtown Baghdad near a meeting attended by a U.S. official. In response, the 19-member Blackwater team — known by its call sign Raven 23 — established a blockade at nearby Nisoor Square.

The government says six of the 19 members of Raven 23, including the four defendants, fired shots that resulted in the deaths of at least 14 people and injuries to at least 18 others.

One of the defendants, Slatten, “initiated the entire incident” by firing the first shots that day “without justification,” the prosecutors said, firing his sniper rifle from a concealed position inside the convoy’s command vehicle.

In 2010, prosecutors obtained indictments against former Blackwater president Gary Jackson and four others on felony firearms violations involving dozens of weapons. All charges against three of the accused were dismissed after a federal judge ruled to reduce several of the felony charges to misdemeanors. Jackson and the former company vice president admitted guilt on misdemeanor charges.

Last year, Academi settled federal criminal charges against the company, paying a $7.5 million fine for firearms violations. Academi also settled lawsuits brought by survivors of the Iraqi civilians killed during the Baghdad shooting.

FILE – This Sept. 25, 2007 file photo shows an Iraqi traffic policeman inspects a car destroyed by a Blackwater security detail in al-Nisoor Square in Baghdad, Iraq. After years of delays, four former guards from the security firm Blackwater Worldwide are facing trial in the killings of 14 Iraqi civilians and the wounding of 18 others in bloodshed that inflamed anti-American sentiment around the globe. Whether the shootings were self-defense or an unprovoked attack, the carnage of Sept. 16, 2007 was seen by critics of the George W. Bush administration as an illustration of a war gone horribly wrong. A trial in the nearly 7-year-old case is scheduled to begin with jury selection on Wednesday, barring last-minute legal developments. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed, File)