The Iraqi Police
This entry was posted on 6/1/2006 8:33 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
Last night I moved from the airport complex to a smaller base on the other side of town. The airport is in the western part of the city (or its western suburbs; I’ve never been quite sure where Baghdad ends) and surrounded by mostly Sunni neighborhoods. Now I’m in eastern Baghdad, where neighborhoods like New Baghdad and Sadr City are heavily or almost entirely Shia.
Some of the themes are the same on both sides of town. The Iraqi Police officers working out of the local stations want more of everything. They say they’re short of weapons, ammunition, fuel and vehicles, and blame the Ministry of the Interior. This is a massive and daunting undertaking. At the most basic level there’s the logistical and administrative challenge of training, equipping and organizing tens of thousands of men into an effective national police force. The Americans are up against differences in culture and language and an Iraqi ministry notorious even by Iraqi standards for its corruption.
On top of that, the men who train and deploy as Iraqi Police enter an organization that is the primary victim of an absolutely merciless insurgency. More than 50 percent of all insurgent attacks in Baghdad hit Iraqi Police because they are the easiest target. Some of the American military police training Iraqis in west Baghdad spoke of rooftop gunmen shooting down onto the grounds of the Iraqi Police Station across the street. Roadside bombs are a menace to American vehicles laden with so much protection I have to strain to pull my door shut. Iraqi cops move around the city in flatbed pickups. Unlike soldiers in the Iraqi Army, Iraqi police live in the neighborhoods where they work, meaning the risk of exposure and the danger to their families is much greater.
It’s a tough line for the US to walk. It would be easy to complain that these cops are being hung out to dry. But the experience of the past several years has been that throwing a lot of equipment and money at Iraqi security forces is, in the end, a wasted effort—the Iraqis became dependent, logistically, on American handouts and reliant, militarily, on American bailouts.
There’s a realism to the new approach of passing more and more responsibility to the Interior Ministry and the police themselves. When I got here for the first time in January of 2004 many people here were still speaking in superlatives about where Iraq would end up. With the war entering its fourth year there’s an understanding that the goal is not to create an Iraqi police force in the American image. It’s to create an Iraqi police force that won’t disintegrate in the face of the insurgency and can provide a basic level of law and order in Iraq’s cities and towns.
The latest challenge to that goal is the sectarian violence that ramped up in the aftermath of the shrine bombing in Samara. Hundreds of bodies are turning up in neighborhoods like New Baghdad. That sort of threat to civil order would challenge a fully trained, fully equipped police force that was not under attack by guerillas. Those killings have fallen off since the big spike right after the shrine attack, but the new baseline for sectarian violence is higher. It remains to be seen whether this is the new normal, a stop on the way back to a lower level of violence, or the calm before the storm.
