IHT : Integrating Sunnis into Iraqi police hits hurdle

Integrating Sunnis into Iraqi police hits hurdle

By Michael R. Gordon | October 28, 2007

HABBANIYA, Iraq: The American military's push to organize Sunni Arabs into local neighborhood watch groups has been one of the most important U.S. initiatives in Iraq - so much so that President George W. Bush flew to Anbar Province in September to highlight growing alliances with Sunni tribal leaders.

But now that the United States is trying to institutionalize the arrangement by training the Sunnis to become police officers, the effort has been hampered by halfhearted support and, occasionally, outright resistance from a Shiite-dominated national government still inclined to see the Sunnis as a threat.

It was the U.S. military that pressed to open the new Habbaniya Police Training Center, where Sunni tribesmen and former insurgents are to be trained to serve as police officers in Anbar. And it was the Americans who provided the uniforms, food, new classrooms and equipment for the police recruits.

While the Iraqi government has agreed to basic police instruction at the academy, it has balked at training more senior officers there. The government has also scaled back plans by Anbar officials to expand the provincial police force by almost 50 percent.

"The Ministry of Interior deals with the Sunni provinces different than they deal with the other provinces," said Brigadier General David Phillips, a U.S. Army officer who oversees the training of the Iraq police. "The only reason the Anbar academy opened is because we built it, paid for it and staffed it." He said the Interior Ministry "was very hesitant about it."

The ministry says that it pays the salaries of the Iraqi personnel here and that more money will come as soon as proper administrative procedures are established between the government and the academy.

Anbar is not the only source of contention. In Diyala Province, north of Baghdad, U.S. military officers have pushed the Iraqi government to hire more than 6,000 local Iraqis, many of them Sunnis, as police officers. Despite promises of action by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, none have been hired by the Interior Ministry.

Major General Benjamin Mixon, who is winding up a tour as the senior U.S. commander for northern Iraq, said in an interview at his headquarters at Camp Speicher that the "foot-dragging" stems from "highly sectarian" hiring in Baghdad. "They want to make sure that not too many Sunnis are hired," he said. "The situation is unsatisfactory in terms of hiring Iraqi police."

The rise in tensions over efforts to hire more Sunni police officers comes at a critical moment in the U.S. military deployment in Iraq. With the number of U.S. combat brigades set to decline by a quarter by mid-July, U.S. commanders are eager to build up the Iraqis' capability to secure their neighborhoods.

One way has been to organize local Sunnis into neighborhood watch groups, what the U.S. military calls "Concerned Local Citizens." The benefits of this approach have been evident near Yusufiya and Mahmudiya, in an area south of Baghdad that was once so violent it had been known as the "triangle of death" and has been overseen by the 2nd Brigade of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division.

Before neighborhood watch groups were organized in this region in June, more than 12 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers were killed each month in the area, according to an analysis circulating within the U.S. military command. After June, the casualties declined to 1 soldier killed each month. The number of vehicles destroyed from roadside bombs was running at 11 per month before June, but is averaging less than 1 per month now.

But organizing local Iraqis into neighborhood watch groups is just the first step. The Americans' ultimate goal is to codify the arrangement by training these groups as police officers. The Americans also hope that by persuading the government to hire Sunnis as officers they will encourage a ground-up form of political accommodation. Shiite-dominated ministries in Baghdad will develop new working relations with largely Sunni police forces in the field, easing the sectarian divide and laying the basis for a more representative national government, or so the theory goes.

At its best, the process of hiring new Sunni Arab police is a bureaucratic one. Prospective recruits have their fingerprints taken and undergo retina scans that are included in an intelligence database. The list of potential recruits is submitted to the Interior Ministry, which in turn generally submits them to a committee of national reconciliation overseen by close aides to Maliki.

With persistent U.S. pressure, the process has led to some new hires. In the town of Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, 1,738 of the 2,400 Sunnis who had been put forward to serve as officers in the town were hired.

Plans have been made to add 12,000 new police officers in Baghdad over the next six months, and it is estimated that about half would be drawn from the ranks of local Concerned Local Citizens. But as Diyala indicates, the process does not always run smoothly.

Maliki ordered that the Diyala police force be increased by more than 6,000, and provincial officials submitted a list of names in July that included many Sunnis to the Interior Ministry in Baghdad. But some Interior Ministry officials have questioned whether such a substantial increase was needed, and some members of the reconciliation committee have argued that the original decree by Maliki may no longer be valid, putting the plan to hire them as police officers in limbo.

While no action has been taken on the list, the Iraqi government surprised the Americans by hiring 548 Iraqis who were not on the roster. When U.S. officials analyzed the new hires they determined that the list was predominantly made up of Shiites.