Sect bias in Iraq criticized - A U.S. commander accuses the Interior Ministry of being slow to hire Sunni Muslims for the police force.

The comments put in stark terms the sectarian divisions in Iraq's Shiite-led Interior Ministry, which has been beset by allegations of infiltration by Shiite Muslim militiamen and human rights violations, including torture. U.S. officials are rarely so openly critical of the agencies with which they are nominally partnering to try to stabilize the country.

The comments also ran counter to recent remarks by the U.S. ambassador here, who said strides had been made in bringing Sunni Arabs into the police forces.

Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, who will soon conclude his 15-month term commanding the U.S. forces in northern provinces, said he had negotiated Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's approval in May for the Interior Ministry to hire 6,000 additional Iraqi police officers for Diyala province north of Baghdad.

Mixon said he had hoped the officers would be a mix of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds to reflect the region's ethnic and religious makeup -- especially Sunnis, who make up a large share of the population. But six months later, he said, the officers had still not been hired because of "certain individuals trying to influence who is being hired."

"The problem we're dealing with now is what still appears to be sectarian divides in the Ministry of Interior that is responsible for the support to the police," he said, speaking via teleconference from Camp Speicher, outside the northern city of Tikrit.

"There's still a lot of work to be done down there to do away with the sectarian decision-making that occurs in the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad."

Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, a spokesman for the ministry, disputed the allegation and said the agency had made great strides in making the police force more reflective of the population.

"In the ministry, the issue of a national balance is a really very important point, and taking into consideration that the recruits will be from all over the spectrum," he said. "Not accepting a certain segment is not true and is not accepted."