U.S. faces latest trouble with Iraqi forces: Loyalty

U.S. faces latest trouble with Iraqi forces: Loyalty

By Edward Wong Copyright by The New York Times

MONDAY, MARCH 6, 2006



BAGHDAD For much of the war in Iraq, U.S. military commanders have said their most important mission here was to prepare Iraqi security forces to take over the fight against the Sunni- led insurgency. But with the threat of full-scale sectarian strife looming larger, they are suddenly grappling with the possibility that they have been arming one side in a prospective civil war.

Now, they are making it a central goal to weed out ethnic or religious loyalties from the Iraqi forces, particularly in the police, which is controlled at the highest levels by Iranian-backed religious Shiite parties. Militiamen loyal to conservative clerics have flooded the police ranks in Baghdad and the south, and reports of uniformed death squads have risen sharply in the past year.

The U.S. military risks alienating religious Shiite leaders with its efforts, but could win some favor among recalcitrant Sunni Arabs, further drawing them into the political process. It is trying an array of possible solutions, including affirmative action programs for Sunni Arabs in police academies, firing Shiite police commanders who appear to tolerate militias and deploying 200 training teams composed of Americans who had been police officers or military policemen to Iraqi police stations around the country, even in remote and risky locations.

For example, U.S. commanders say they have ensured that a new academy class of 1,200 paramilitary recruits is virtually all Sunni, to shift from Shiite dominance. Recently, U.S. advisers in Baghdad had a Sunni replace a Shiite paramilitary commander who appeared to tolerate Shiite militiamen. The new commander purged the ranks. Now, Shiite officers in that unit no longer openly display stickers of Moktada al-Sadr, the radical cleric, on their guns or cars, the U.S. advisers say.
Several of the initiatives, like the overhauling of the sectarian makeup of some academy classes, have been going on for months but are now being done on a larger scale. Others, such as the deployment of the new police training teams, are just getting started on any significant level.

There is no quick fix, senior military officials acknowledge: Besides resistance from Shiite politicians, cleansing the police forces could take years because sectarian loyalties have become so entrenched and because police officers are rooted in their communities.

The police came under harsh criticism during the violence following the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra on Feb. 22. In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, as mobs led by Shiite militiamen attacked dozens of Sunni mosques and left hundreds dead, many police units stood aside out of confusion or sectarian loyalties, according to Iraqi witnesses. Iraqi security forces asserted their presence only after clerics called for calm.

General George Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Friday that police officers allowed militiamen through checkpoints in eastern Baghdad, where much of the violence occurred.

The Iraqi Army poses less of a problem than the police, because the U.S. military has direct operational control over it and because the Americans took more care in building it up.

The military's efforts to revamp the police are taking place alongside a strong push by the U.S. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, to get Iraqi politicians who are forming the new government to appoint a nonsectarian figure as head of the Interior Ministry, which controls the police.

"When you're forming a government, you can't form it with any kind of sectarian element," said Major General J.D. Thurman, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, charged with controlling Baghdad. "That's got to be put aside, particularly with military forces."

Officials at the most powerful Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or Sciri, which oversees the Interior Ministry, have sharply lashed out at the Americans, arguing that the majority Shiites have the right to control security because Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated government used security forces to abduct, torture and kill Shiites on a mass scale.

"The Shiites were beheaded by the security forces before and we are not ready to be beheaded again," said Hadi al-Amiri, leader of the Badr Organization, Sciri's militia trained in Iran. "We can relinquish any part of the government except for the security forces."

The attempts to erase sectarianism dovetail with a broader U.S. initiative to strengthen police training by diverting more resources from mentoring the Iraqi Army. The military hopes to have 200,000 Iraqi police officers in place by early next year. The development of the police is in some ways more crucial than that of the army, because the Americans want the police to handle all security inside Iraq.

The units believed to be most plagued by militia recruitment and sectarian loyalties are the police paramilitary forces, which have a total of 17,500 fighters, the U.S. military says. The regular blue-uniformed police force numbers 89,000. But there are serious doubts about whether anyone has an accurate overall tally.

The paramilitary forces are divided three ways: the commandos, the public- order brigades and a mechanized brigade that will soon be shifted to the army.

The Interior Ministry is accused of sponsoring death squads in police or paramilitary uniforms. Khalilzad has been outspoken in his criticism of the interior minister, Bayan Jabr, and hinted last month that the Americans may withhold financing if sectarianism continues to dominate the security forces.

U.S. commanders say recent scrutiny of the public-order brigades, which were expanded after Sciri took control of the Interior Ministry in early 2005 and whose 7,700 members do light infantry duty, showed that virtually all the members were Shiites.

"When we stood them up, we didn't ask, 'Are you Sunni or are you Shia?'" Major General Joseph Peterson, the U.S. officer overseeing police training, said in an interview at a base in Taji, as he was visiting incoming soldiers assigned to advise the Iraqi police. "They ended up being 99 percent Shia. Now, when we look at that, we say, 'They do not reflect the population of Iraq.'"

No accurate census of Iraq exists, but the country is believed to be about 60 percent Shiite Arab, 20 percent Sunni Arab and 20 percent Kurdish (most Kurds are Sunni). The Americans have pushed the Interior Ministry to diversify the forces. All recruits in the public- order brigades have to go through a six- or seven-week training course, with 1,200 in each class. The Americans ensured that the last three classes enrolled greater numbers of Sunni Arabs: The first of those was 42 percent Sunni Arab, the second 92 percent Sunni and the third, which is just starting, is virtually all Sunni, Peterson said.
U.S. officers say that when they try to talk to Iraqi commanders about the religious or ethnic breakdown of the forces, the commanders tend to shy away from those conversations, as most Iraqis do, saying they prefer to think of themselves as one people rather than in terms of sect.

Colonel Gordon Davis, the top adviser to the public order brigades, said the senior commander of that force, a Shiite Arab from the old Iraqi Army, addresses the issue only with much reluctance. "'You shouldn't be talking like this,' he tells us," the colonel said in an interview at the Iraqi command base in Kadhimiya, a Baghdad neighborhood.

Davis said his advisers have no qualms about removing Iraqi commanders if it becomes evident they have sectarian loyalties.
For much of last year, the 2nd Public Order Brigade had a particularly bad reputation. It was accused by many Iraqis, especially Sunni Arabs, of torture and illegal killings. Its ranks were filled with men recruited from eastern Baghdad who were loyal to Sadr, the firebrand Shiite cleric who has led two rebellions against the Americans.

The head of the brigade was the former police chief of Nasiriya, a southern city under the sway of hard-line Shiite parties, and was "rumored to tolerate" militias, Davis said. The Americans replaced him with a Sunni Arab commander in December, who then fired 160 people below him, presumably because he suspected those men of ties to militias, the colonel said.
Davis said that having the Sunni Arab in charge proved helpful during the militia-driven violence the day of the shrine bombing. The brigade was dispatched to guard Sunni mosques around Baghdad. While the Sunni commander spoke to Sunni imams to calm them, his Shiite officers tried to placate the raging Shiite mobs.

Matthew Sherman, a former Interior Ministry adviser, though, said the commandos also have significant numbers of Shiites loyal to Sciri. Major General Adnan Thabit, a Sunni Arab, is head of the commandos in name only, he said, having ceded control to Shiite partisans. "They've just taken a more kind of political bent over the past 10 months or so," Sherman said.
David S. Cloud contributed reporting from Washington.