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Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi’s office announced on Sunday that an investigation had revealed the existence of 50,000 ‘ghost soldiers,’ Agence France-Presse reports, according to Sputnik.

“The prime minister revealed the existence of 50,000 fictitious names” in the country’s military, a statement from Abadi’s office noted after a regular session of the country’s parliament. The statement noted that the prime minister had already scrapped the phantom jobs, equivalent to nearly four army divisions. “Over the past few weeks, the PM has been cracking down to expose the ghost soldiers and get to the root of the problem,” Abadi’s spokesman Rafid Jaboori was quoted by AFP as saying.

‘Ghost soldiers’, literally translated from Arabic as ‘space men’, are soldiers listed on the payroll of Iraq’s security forces, but do not actually exist. Officers and even the commanders of entire brigades have been suspected of listing more men under their command than really exist. They do so by firing soldiers and not taking them off the payroll, splitting salaries, pocketing half and giving the rest to men who do not show up to work, and even listing soldiers who have defected or been killed.

Mohammed Othman al-Khalidi, former lawmaker and leader of the Mutahidoun political bloc in Iraq’s parliament, told al-Monitor that these “ghost employees were one of the reasons behind the shocking collapse of the Iraqi army before the Islamic State in Mosul” this past June. Khalidi estimated that up to 30 percent of Iraq’s army were actually ‘ghosts’, noting that this problem exists at all levels of government, not just in the military. Explaining the deep roots of the problem of ghost personnel, Qasim Mozan noted that it existed in Iraq to some extent even before 2003, while Saddam Hussein was still in power.