BAGHDAD—Geoff Harries didn’t know his son Andrew was even in Iraq when the call came through saying the former British soldier had been killed in an ambush near the northern city of Mosul.“It was a complete shock because I had no idea he was there,” Harries told the BBC in May. “I am shattered, as if I’m in a bad dream. I want to wake up and find it’s not right.”Unfortunately, his is a nightmare all too familiar to the parents of many ex-soldiers lured to hot spots such as Iraq by the prospect of a fast fortune in return for their military and security expertise.With the official US body count over the past 18 months now topping 1,000, and the Iraqi death toll in the unrecorded thousands, another tally is quietly creeping up.Since April 2003, at least 151 foreign contractors, ranging from Nepalese cooks to South African bodyguards, have died in Iraq, according to Iraq Coalition Casualties (icasualties.org), a website which tracks the body count.Of these deaths, recorded via monitoring of international and local media, nearly a third are “security consultants”—essentially ex-soldiers hired to guard anything from oil installations, to diplomats, politicians or foreign businessmen.Some of the deaths hit the headlines, such as that of Fabrizio Quattrocchi, an Italian security adviser executed by his kidnappers in April this year.Others, however, are only reported in the victim’s local papers, their names and job descriptions withheld by families or employers often accused of moving in a shadowy, mercenary world.South Africans, many from the ranks of crack but now out-of-work apartheid-era troops, make frequent appearances in the incident reports. Personal details are often sketchy.One, blown up by a land mine in Fallujah in May, was “believed to have been working for a British security company and is thought to have been providing close body protection to an Iraqi dignitary,” South Africa’s Cape Argus newspaper said.A fellow countryman gunned down 12 hours earlier while working as a security guard in the southern port city of Basra has remained unnamed at his family’s request.Stay alive, get richThere is no official record for the number of local or foreign security contractors in Iraq, although the most frequently cited estimates put the total at 15,000 to 20,000.By contrast, Britain, the second-biggest contributor to the US-led coalition, has around 8,500 troops in Iraq.“It’s the largest ever deployment of private security companies, without parallel,” said Christopher Beese of ArmorGroup, a 20-year-old British private security company.“But it’s impossible to know exactly how many because so many agencies are involved and there’s no central register.”According to Beese, the industry has gro2wn so big after last year’s US-led invasion of Iraq that it can no longer be left to operate in an unregulated, international policy vacuum.“When all this is over, we’re going to have to sit down with governments and other companies and work out what went well and what didn’t. We must push for regulation so that there is more openness. At the moment, nobody is required to give any information,” he said.While the estimates of numbers are staggering, so too are the sums of cash involved. If you can stay alive long enough, you can get very rich.At the sharpest end of the industry—short-term protection contracts for political bigwigs or businessmen—a security guard may make as much as $1,500 a day, almost what a US private takes home in a month.The vast majority of workers, who exist at the “security” rather than “military” end of the spectrum, say they earn nothing like that, but admit the main draw is still cash.“At some point, you’ve got to start thinking about lining your own nest,” said one security contractor, who says he earns as much in 11 weeks in the private sector as he did in seven months with the British army in Iraq.Others argue that no amount of money is too much for a job, which can, literally, end up killing you.“To put your life on the line, for a lost cause in a very dangerous and unpredictable environment, on a daily basis, well, I don’t believe that any amount of money is truly worth it,” said one security adviser based in Afghanistan.Unstable worldIn an increasingly unstable world, companies with suitably military names are springing up to meet security demands—SAS International, Meteoric Tactical Solutions, Custer Battles, or Erinys International, named after the vengeance-seeking “Furies” of classical mythology, to list a few.Nor is there any let-up in the influx of heavily tattooed, gum-chewing beefcakes flying into Baghdad, biceps bulging, even though they are targets for insurgents hellbent on removing America and its allies, in whatever guise, from Iraqi soil.Unfortunately, for some like Herman “Harry” Pretorius, a South African who worked as a bodyguard for American security company DynCorp, theirs was a one-way ticket.The father of two was killed after being taken alive by militants who ambushed his vehicle near Mosul.“I don’t know if he will ever come home. Apparently the people who took him want money to return his body,” his wife said.Another South African, Francois Strydom, was killed when a suicide bomb ripped through a Baghdad hotel in January. He went to Iraq to secure a financial future for his family and instead, left his wife and the 10 children from their previous marriages destitute and fatherless.