BAGHDAD — U.S. officials have revamped and expanded training programs for Iraqi police units amid mounting concern that their focus on fighting insurgents, and not protecting citizens, has created an unaccountable force plagued by corruption and rights abuses.
The police units are under the Iraqi Interior Ministry, led by Bayan Jabr, a Shiite Muslim with ties to a sectarian militia. The predominantly Shiite force has become highly politicized and is accused of torture and death squad operations against Iraq's Sunni Arab minority.
Those concerns were reinforced Wednesday by the State Department, which highlighted Iraq's "climate of extreme violence in which people were killed for political and other reasons" in its annual global human rights report.
"Reports increased of killings by the government or its agents that may have been politically motivated," the report says. "Members of sectarian militias dominated police units to varying degrees and in different parts of the country."
Problems with the fledgling force have been exacerbated by a lack of steady oversight, some U.S. officials say. For much of the last three years, U.S. advisors to the police units have been stretched thin as the United States focused on training Iraqi army recruits. That has led to a police force that has access to modern equipment, weapons and vehicles, but no track record of keeping control of its hardware, much less its personnel, the officials say.
To address concerns about abuses and improve accountability, the Bush administration has tripled the number of training teams being attached to police forces throughout the nation and expanded police training academies in Jordan and Iraq.
Some U.S. advisors say they are concerned about the consequences of training courses that have skewed toward weapons handling and battlefield tactics and not dealt enough with human rights, investigations and administration.
"There is a tension between survival and defeating the insurgency of the moment, versus where we know we have to get in a civil democratic society," said Robert M. Witajewski, the top civilian police trainer and director of the U.S. Embassy's Narcotics, Law Enforcement and Correctional Affairs program. "It's walking a fine line. You can over-militarize the police, and all you're doing is creating an entity that could cause a coup down the road."
