[NYTr] Integrating Sunnis into Iraqi police hits another snag

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The International Herald Tribune - Oct 28, 2007
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=8079782


Integrating Sunnis into Iraqi police hits hurdle

By Michael R. Gordon

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 half-hearted 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.

Copyright © 2007 The International Herald Tribune