NUMANIYA, IRAQ — "Police, police, police!"
Young recruits cradling make-believe machine guns lined up in front of a building, identified themselves three times in Arabic, then burst through the door.
Iraq works to clean up national police
THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ: TRAINING FOR POLICE
Training, integration and anti-corruption efforts are aimed at creating a reliable, competent force.
The drill may have been standard, but the class at the police training center here was not: For the first time, the class -- 1,830 cadets who graduated Jan. 21 -- included as many Sunni as Shiite Muslims.
They are part of an effort to overhaul the national police, a force that is equated in the minds of many Iraqis with Shiite death squads that kidnap, torture and kill Sunnis, whose bodies once turned up by the dozens each day in Baghdad's garbage dumps and sewers.
Last year, national police chief Maj. Gen. Hussein Awadi sent recruiting teams into former Sunni insurgent strongholds such as Anbar and Diyala provinces to persuade Sunnis to join the overwhelmingly Shiite force. He has also pulled hundreds of corrupt and abusive policemen off the streets; standardized uniforms, equipment and training; and introduced a computerized payroll to help reduce fraud.
But his biggest challenge, he said, is convincing his critics that the national police force has changed. As recently as September, an independent U.S. commission recommended that the force be disbanded.
"It has become something like the hanger on which everyone hangs their dirty laundry," said the wiry commander, fingering worry beads at his office in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, about 80 miles northwest of the Numaniya training center. Every time there is an abuse of authority, the assumption is that the national police must be responsible.
"I don't deny that there are probably still some mistakes being made," Awadi said. "But as soon as we are made aware of them, we act on them."
A commission led by retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones found that the national police remained "a highly sectarian element of the Iraqi security forces and one that for the most part is unable to contribute to security and stability in Iraq."
The force reports to the Interior Ministry, which the panel concluded was so riddled with corruption and sectarian factions that it would be incapable of carrying out reforms.
The panel recommended using about 6,000 of the 26,000 members of the force to create specialized units to assist with ordnance disposal, civil unrest control and other tasks beyond the abilities of local police. The rest of the members should be absorbed by the police and army, it said.
U.S. military officials in Iraq acknowledge major shortcomings in the national police, but say Iraqi leaders are weeding out sectarian elements.
"They chose an option to attempt to eliminate . . . bad actors and to then put in the right leadership and train the force in order to reform," said Army Maj. Gen. Michael Jones, who commands the U.S. assistance teams that advise the Iraqi Interior Ministry. "In this case, it appears to me that their option is working."
In just over a year, all nine brigade commanders have been replaced -- one of them twice -- for improper behavior, along with 18 of the 27 battalion commanders and about 1,300 rank-and-file policemen, according to U.S. figures. Thousands more have been removed from the rolls for being absent without leave, Awadi said.
But senior leaders are rarely brought to trial; most are reassigned to less influential positions within the ministry.
Accusations of misconduct dog all of Iraq's security forces, but few are as feared as the national police. It was created to rein in a patchwork of commando-style, anti-terrorist units with questionable loyalties and no unified command.
U.S. advisors to Bayan Jabr, a Shiite who became interior minister in May 2005, accused him of purging Sunnis from the ministry and organizing Shiite militiamen into special police commando brigades. Jabr said the new commandos were needed to pursue Sunni extremists responsible for relentless bomb attacks on Shiite communities and the Iraqi security forces. He conceded that there was some militia infiltration, but denied that it was systematic or widespread.
When the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in February 2006 pushed Iraq into civil war, it became clear that Shiite militiamen were using the commando units as cover for death squads that roamed Baghdad targeting Sunni civilians.
In April that year, U.S.-led forces persuaded Jabr to combine the commandos and other heavily armed units into a single force, the national police.
Under Jabr's successor, Jawad Bolani, national police officers have been vetted and sent on a four-week basic training course that focuses on professionalism and ethics -- in most cases, the first training they had received. Upon completion of the course, they have been issued blue, digital-print uniforms. Jabr had maintained that criminals were buying fake uniforms in markets, but the new ones are more difficult to replicate.
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