[lbo-talk] Allbritton in TIME: Why Iraq's Police Are a Deadly Problem

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Thu Mar 23 16:38:19 PST 2006


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.

Copyright © 2006 Time Inc. All rights reserved.



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