NYT : Iraq Stumbling in Bid to Purge Its Rogue Police

Iraq Stumbling in Bid to Purge Its Rogue Police

By EDWARD WONG and PAUL von ZIELBAUER | September 17, 2006

BAGHDAD, Sept. 16 — Shiite militiamen and criminals entrenched throughout Iraq’s police and internal security forces are blocking recent efforts by some Iraqi leaders and the American military to root them out, a step critical to winning the trust of skeptical Sunni Arabs and quelling the sectarian conflict, Iraqi and Western officials say.

The new interior minister, Jawad al-Bolani, who oversees the police, lacks the political support to purge many of the worst offenders, including senior managers who tolerated or encouraged the infiltration of Shiite militias into the police under the previous government, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials who work with the ministry and the police.

No one expected a housecleaning to be easy, and some headway has been made in firing people. But despite that progress, recent difficulties reveal the magnitude of the task facing Mr. Bolani and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. When he took office in late May, Mr. Maliki said one of his top goals was to reform the Shiite-led Interior Ministry, which had, to the minority Sunni Arabs, become synonymous with government complicity in abduction, torture and killing.

The ministry recently discovered that more than 1,200 policemen and other employees had been convicted years ago of murder, rape and other violent crimes, said a Western diplomat who has close contact with the ministry. Some were even on death row. Few have been fired.

Despite the importance American commanders place on hiring more Sunni Arabs for the overwhelmingly Shiite police force, the ministry still has no way to screen recruits by sect or for militia allegiance. Such loyalties are the root cause of the ministry’s problems.

A senior American commander said that of the 27 paramilitary police battalions, “we think 5 or 6 battalions probably have leaders that have led that part of the organization in a way that is either criminal or sectarian or both.”

Death squads in uniforms could be responsible for the recent surge in sectarian violence, with at least 165 bodies found across Baghdad since Wednesday.

There is little accountability. The government has stopped allowing joint Iraqi and American teams to inspect Iraqi prisons. No senior ministry officials have been prosecuted on charges of detainee mistreatment, in spite of fresh discoveries of abuse and torture, including a little-reported case involving children packed into a prison of more than 1,400 inmates. Internal investigations into secret prisons, corruption and other potential criminal activity are often blocked.

The Americans view an overhaul of the Ministry of the Interior as a crucial step in helping rein in the growing sectarian conflict.

“I think there are some definite issues in the M.O.I.,” Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the second-ranking commander in Iraq, said in an interview. “I think there probably needs to be some leadership changes. But I know the minister of interior himself is working those.”

Mr. Bolani, a Shiite engineer appointed last May, sincerely wants to purge the ministry of Shiite partisans brought in by his predecessor, the officials interviewed said. But his independence from powerful Shiite political leaders — the very quality that earned him the job — also means Mr. Bolani has limited power to remove politically connected subordinates and enact changes.

“He’s got to be careful about what he does, just to stay alive,” the Western diplomat said.

An American adviser to the ministry said Mr. Bolani was unavailable for an interview last week.

A New Security Plan

Some tentative progress has been made under the new government. Death squads in police uniforms no longer kidnap and kill with absolute impunity in parts of Sunni-dominated western Baghdad, many Iraqis say. The American military estimates there was a 52 percent drop in the daily rate of execution-style killings from July to August.

Officials attribute the decline to a new Baghdad security plan, more police oversight by American trainers and policy changes in the ministry. Military officials say the killings in the past week took place in neighborhoods not yet cleared out by security sweeps and are not necessarily the work of policemen — imposters are rife throughout Iraq.

“The performance has improved slightly,” said Ayad al-Samarraie, a legislator and senior official in the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni Arab group that is sharply critical of the Interior Ministry. “Less people are kidnapped, and there are less raids by the militias on the people.”

Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said the ministry had fired 1,500 employees since June. They include senior officers like the police chief of Anbar Province. Mr. Bolani is pushing to enact a law that would ban the ministry’s 167,000 employees from belonging to a political party.

Yet, a powerful official suspected of aiding the Shiite militias, Adnan al-Asadi — nicknamed Triple A by the Americans — still holds the job of deputy minister of dministration. Mr. Asadi is “the one who really runs the M.O.I.,” said Saleh Mutlak, a Sunni Arab legislator. Mr. Bolani wants to oust Mr. Asadi but does not have the political backing to do so, leaving American advisers frustrated, said an American official who was not authorized to talk publicly on the subject and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Asadi supports the ministry’s inspector general, whom the advisers consider wholly ineffective. American advisers set up an internal affairs unit late last year to conduct honest in-house inquiries. But the two offices constantly feud, and the internal affairs unit does not have full authority to investigate the police in the provinces.

A recent fingerprinting campaign throughout the ministry showed that 1,228 police officers and ministry employees had been convicted of violent crimes under Saddam Hussein’s government, said the Western diplomat, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of protocol. A handful had been sentenced to death.

“These are rapists, murderers, drug dealers,” the diplomat said. “The impression I got is that there are a lot more out there.”

Mr. Bolani has said he intends to fire some of them. But a wholesale purging of the ministry’s most criminally violent employees is impossible, the diplomat said, because “they’re going to go straight to the militias, or set up their own criminal gangs.”

Even top Pentagon officials now acknowledge the ministry’s deeply rooted dysfunctions.

“Corruption, illegal activity and sectarian bias have constrained progress in developing M.O.I. forces,” according to a Pentagon report issued to Congress at the end of August. “Inappropriate tolerance of and infiltration by Shia militias, some of which are influenced by Iran, is the primary concern of the government of Iraq.”

Trouble With Elite Units

Since May, when Shiite politicians fought to keep control of the ministry under the new government, the ministry’s total force has grown to more than 167,000 from 146,000. It is divided into 118,000 regular police officers, 24,400 paramilitary troops and 24,700 border guards.

Of those, the paramilitary units now called the national police are the most feared. They are a major focus of efforts at change. Under Bayan Jabr, a conservative Shiite politician who was Mr. Bolani’s predecessor, fighters from the two most powerful Shiite militias, the Badr Organization and the Mahdi Army, were recruited into the ranks of those elite units.

Assaults on civilians by gunmen in paramilitary uniforms have continued in some predominantly Sunni or mixed areas of Baghdad.

A woman who asked to be identified as Umm Shahad said in an interview that her 24-year-old son, a Sunni Arab, was recently taken from his car at a checkpoint run by paramilitary officers in their neighborhood, Jihad. She said she went to the unit’s local stationhouse and to the Interior Ministry to search for him. Officials at each place said they had no idea where he was.

“These were real commandos,” she said of her son’s abductors. “We are so afraid.”

Col. Damon Penn, the senior American adviser to the national police’s 9,000-member Second Division, acknowledged that “there are still some militias operating within the national police.”

“I think there are some individuals and small cells that they need to purge to make this a truly governmental force,” he said. But progress had been made, he insisted. So suspect are the national police that the American military and Iraqi Army began inspections of each battalion in August. The reviews include recording the serial numbers of all national police weapons and vehicles. Twelve battalions have already been inspected, and the rest are expected to be completed by October, when the units will get new blue uniforms.

Each brigade will be pulled from the field one by one and put through a six-week training course in policing and the rule of law, Colonel Penn said.

Four of the eight national police brigades are expected to be deployed soon from Baghdad to the provinces, so building public confidence in them is critical.

Prisoner Abuse by the Police

The Iraqi and American inspectors assigned to the police prison known as Site 4 found themselves walking through a chamber of horrors at the end of May.

More than 1,400 prisoners had been packed into a small area by the Wolf Brigade, a national police unit accused of abuses by Sunni Arabs.

Prisoners with “lesions resulting from torture” were found during the inspection in eastern Baghdad on May 30, as was “equipment used for this purpose,” according to a human rights report recently released by the United Nations mission here.

Some prisoners had been beaten, others bound and hung by their arms, an American officer said. There were at least 37 children or teenagers.

The discovery showed that torture by the police was still rampant despite promises by government officials to end it. Right after Site 4 was examined, the government stopped allowing joint Iraqi and American teams to inspect Iraqi prisons.

American commanders and Iraqi human rights officials say the treatment of detainees remains troubling. “New evidence has continued to emerge pointing to torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment in detention centers,” the United Nations report said.

The Ministry of Human Rights reported that 4,331 detainees were being held in Interior Ministry prisons as of Aug. 31. Yet no one has a clear estimate of the number of prisons run by the Interior Ministry, because some elite police brigades operate detention centers on their bases.

The Second Division of the national police, for instance, holds 250 detainees in four cramped rooms at Camp Justice, the division headquarters in northern Baghdad. That number is down from 650 last March. But American advisers there recently found 12 prisoners with bruises and black eyes.

The possible existence of secret prisons like the torture compound discovered in the Jadriya neighborhood last year continues to worry American commanders.

“It’s obviously a concern,” said Brig. Gen. Dana J. H. Pittard, who is in charge of the operational training of the national police. “The pessimistic side of me says they exist.”

Crowding and a lack of access to judges are widespread problems, despite Mr. Maliki’s order for a mass prisoner release in June, said Wijdan M. Salim, the minister of human rights. Detainees can languish in prison for months before seeing a judge. Some in Camp Justice have gone six months without appearing before a judge.

Sectarianism and the Police

As long as police units remain overwhelmingly Shiite, the distrust of them that is prevalent among Sunni Arabs will be tough to overcome, Sunni leaders say. Yet, Mr. Bolani has avoided putting in place a policy that would diversify or even track the sectarian makeup of police units and recruits. A ministry spokesman said Mr. Bolani preferred not to think in those terms.

But General Chiarelli, the senior American commander, said: “I’m concerned with some of the ethnic makeup of some of the stations. Our goal was to take a look at that, to work with the minister of interior to get a balance, because I think that’s absolutely essential.”

The weaknesses in having a homogeneous police force became more evident this summer. In one incident, American and Iraqi commanders tried to move the headquarters of a national police brigade from eastern Baghdad, which is mostly Shiite, to Dora, an extremely volatile area that is majority Sunni. A fifth of the 1,500 members quit, Colonel Penn said.

“There are some dedicated Sunni areas that the Shia aren’t comfortable going into, and vice versa,” he said.

The Americans have pushed the ministry to change the Shiite makeup of the national police by filling academy classes with Sunni Arabs. The Second Division was only 7 or 8 percent Sunni Arab at the start of the summer. It is now 20 percent Sunni.

The Iraqi population is estimated to be 60 percent Shiite Arab, 20 percent Sunni Arab and 20 percent Kurd. Asked what the breakdown of the overall police force was, General Chiarelli said he was trying to find out himself.

Getting the balance right is “absolutely critical,” he said, because hostility among Sunni Arabs is still high.

In the southern half of the Ghazaliya neighborhood, a mostly Sunni area in northwest Baghdad, “there is no trust between the people and the Iraqi police,” said a man who called himself Abu Jafr, a guard at a sewage pumping station surrounded by small lakes of raw waste.

“Every time the Iraqi police come to the neighborhood, they get shot at, because people here think they’re from the militias,” he said.

To help change that perception, American commanders across Baghdad are trying a new tactic: having neighborhood police units work alongside Iraqi Army units, which enjoy a modicum of trust even among Sunni Arabs. The Americans have also placed an advisory team in most of the city’s police stations.

At the main station in Ghazaliya, staffed almost entirely by Shiite officers, a group of policemen and Iraqi Army soldiers prepared to roll out on a joint patrol on a recent afternoon. The American battalion commander of the area, Lt. Col. Avanulas Smiley, pointed to the vehicles as he strode from his armored carrier into the walled compound. “That is huge for the Ghazaliyans to see,” he said.

A few days later, six headless bodies turned up in the neighborhood. No one knew who was responsible.