http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1175055,00.html
Monday, Mar. 20, 2006
TIME Magazine
Why Iraq's Police Are a Deadly Problem
Interior Minister Bayan Jabr has turned the U.S.-trained force into
violent Shi'ite shock troops, critics say
By CHRISTOPHER ALLBRITTON/BAGHDAD
The bodies began to show up early last week. On Monday, 34 corpses
were found. In the darkness of Tuesday morning, 15 more men, between
the ages of 22 and 40 were found in the back of a pickup truck in the
al-Khadra district of western Baghdad. They had been hanged. By
daybreak, 40 more bodies were found around the city, most bearing
signs of torture before the men were killed execution-style. The most
gruesome discovery was an 18-by-24-foot mass grave in the Shi'ite slum
of Kamaliyah in east Baghdad containing the bodies of 29 men, clad
only in their underwear with their hands bound and their mouths
covered with tape. Local residents only found it because the ground
was oozing blood. In all, 87 bodies were found over two days in
Baghdad.
The grisly discovery was horrible enough, the latest and perhaps most
chilling sign that Iraq is descending further into butchery -- and
quite possibly civil war. But almost as disturbing is the growing
evidence that the massacres and others like it are being tolerated and
even abetted by Iraq's Shi'ite-dominated police forces, overseen by
Iraq's Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr. On his watch, sectarian militias
have swelled the ranks of the police units and, Sunnis charge, used
their positions to carry out revenge killings against Sunnis. While
allowing an Iranian-trained militia to take over the ministry, critics
say, Jabr has authorized the targeted assassination of Sunni men and
stymied investigations into Interior-run death squads. Despite
numerous attempts to contact them, neither Jabr nor Interior Ministry
spokesmen responded to requests for comment on this article.
Jabr's and his forces' growing reputation for brutality comes at a
particularly inopportune moment for the Bush Administration, which
would like to hand over security responsibilities to those same police
units as quickly as possible. That has raised the distinct and
disturbing possibility that the U.S. is in fact training and arming
one side in a conflict seeming to grow worse by the day. "Militias are
the infrastructure of civil war," U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad
told TIME recently. Khalilzad has been publicly critical of Jabr and
warned that the new security ministries under the next, permanent
Iraqi government should be run by competent people who have no ties to
militias and who are "non-sectarian." Further U.S. support for
training the police and army, he said, depends on it.
But ever since Jabr was appointed Interior Minister after the January
2005 election brought a religious Sh'ite coalition to power, Sunnis
allege, he began remaking the paramilitary National Police into
Shi'ite shock troops. A member of the Iranian-backed Supreme Council
for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Jabr fled to Iran in the
1970s to avoid Saddam's crackdown. Jerry Burke, a former civilian
senior police advisor to the Interior Ministry, said Jabr's experience
with Saddam's government has left him bitter and distrustful of anyone
he suspects has ties to the previous regime. That would most certainly
include the former members of Saddam Hussein's Special Forces and
Republican Guards which initially made up the bulk of the National
Police when Jabr took charge.
To help facilitate his transformation of the police forces, Jabr made
sure to enlist the help of SCIRI's armed wing, the Badr Organization.
Members of the militia have been a growing presence in the National
Police, which now consists of nine brigades, with about 17,500 members
divided between the Special Police Commandos, the Public Order
brigades and a mechanized brigade, which will soon be transferred to
the Ministry of Defense. "Leadership in the commando positions has
been turned over to Badr," said Matt Sherman, a former CPA advisor to
the Interior Ministry. "And new recruits are mostly Badr."
Indeed, outside the ministry headquarters, banners proclaiming
solidarity with Imam Hussein, one of Shi'ites' holiest figures, snap
in the spring breeze alongside -- and sometimes instead of -- Iraqi
flags. Most of the guards' beards are invariably cut in the
close-cropped Iranian style, making them stand out in Baghdad, where
beards are less common.
Like so many things in Iraq right now, it wasn't supposed to be this
way. As far back as December 2003, David Gompert, the former National
Security Advisor for the Coalition Provisional Authority, realized the
dangers sectarian militias posed to Iraq's stability. And in the
waning days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, American viceroy
L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer issued Order 91, which was intended to
demobilize or integrate nine militias totaling about 100,000 men into
the Iraqi security forces. But the Kurdish pesh merga and the armed
wing of SCIRI, the Badr Organization, still exist today because the
order was never completely or competently carried out.
For that, Gompert puts the blame squarely on the Iraqi government,
then under Iyad Allawi, as well as the American embassy. With the U.S.
military engaged in several major operations in 2004 and the
government transitioning from the CPA to a more traditional diplomatic
presence with the arrival of U.S. ambassador John Negroponte at the
end of June, Gompert says, neither Allawi nor the U.S made the
reintegration program a priority. Job training programs run by
Allawi's Labor Ministry were cancelled over personal feuds and pension
programs and other aspects of the program of DDR -- "demilitarization,
demobilization and reintegration" -- were bounced around from one
command to another.
Making matters worse has been the fact that the police -- unlike the
Iraqi Army, which is still under U.S. command and supervision -- were
practically ignored almost from the beginning of the occupation, says
Burke. And what supervision the National Police did get came from U.S.
military intelligence officers, not civilian police advisors.
This grave oversight, which stemmed from the military's unfamiliarity
with civilian police methods and its unwillingness to learn, has led
to numerous abuses and little accountability. The U.S. State
Department, in a report released two weeks ago, documented numerous
incidents in 2005, dating back to early May when Jabr was first
appointed Interior Minister, where Sunni men were killed
execution-style by Interior Ministry police or Shi'ite militias. In
each case, Jabr ordered an investigation, and in each case the
investigation had yet to report any findings.
Thanks in part to the Interior Minister's "nonfeasance," said Burke,
the former Interior Ministry adviser, Jabr was at least indirectly
responsible for the deaths of hundreds of military-age Sunni men whose
bodies have turned up at the sewage plant in southeast Baghdad since
late December. Men in police uniforms and vehicles routinely travel
through the city in daylight hours with bodies in the back of trucks
for disposal at the sewage plant, he said. Prisoners often disappear,
Burke said, because they're picked up at night and no one has an
accurate account of who is arrested and where they are taken. "The
Special Police Commandos," he said, using their old name, "are most
definitely out of control."
So black is the reputation of the National Police, that after the Feb.
22 bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, many Sunnis said the
perpetrators were Interior Ministry troops who were looking for a
pretext to start a civil war. Their fears were further fueled in the
bloody two days after the attack, when Iraq became a sectarian
slaughterhouse. Instead of protecting citizens from each other,
National Police units stood by as Shi'ite rioters -- and rival
militiamen from Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army -- stormed Sunni mosques
and swarmed over Sunni neighborhoods, according to numerous reports,
including some confirmed by U.S. Gen. George Casey, commander of
American forces in Iraq.
The American efforts to try and help stem the deadly sectarianism will
likely do little good -- and in some respects may well exacerbate the
problem. Instead of increasing the number of civilian advisors to
Iraq's local police forces, a spokeswoman for the Multinational
Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I) said more U.S. military
police and military personnel will be assigned to train them. The
Special Police Transition Teams (SPTTs) are the model that will be
followed. "The SPTTs have been very successful in their efforts," the
spokeswoman said. No change is planned for the oversight program on
the National Police.
Gompert notes, "I remember saying, 'If there is going to be a civil
war, it's going to be fought between Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite
militias." And as long as Jabr is running the Interior Ministry and
its police forces, there is little doubt which of the two in such a
conflict will have the law -- and American training -- on its side.
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