After Attacks, Iraqi Security Looks Unready
By NEELA BANERJEE
Published: February 16, 2004
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 16 — Iraqi security forces will be unable to guarantee safety after the planned transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30, a range of Iraqi and Western specialists concluded on Sunday, one day after an audacious raid in Falluja that killed at least 25 people.
A series of bold attacks on military and police forces in Iraq last week culminated in the overrunning on Saturday of a police station in Falluja, about 35 miles west of Baghdad.
"I think it's quite clear the Iraqi security forces, brave as they are, and beaten and attacked as they are, are not going to be ready by July 1," said L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, in an interview Sunday on CNN. "So there will have to be an international presence here after the sovereign government comes into power the first of July."
The week of attacks, which left more than 125 dead, came as the Iraqi Governing Council and the American military have been negotiating over what role the occupation military would play after the transfer. Clearly, many American soldiers will remain in Iraq.
But since summer, the Americans have pulled back to their garrisons and given up many security tasks to the Iraqis. While that transition has served to protect the Americans, the Iraqis have been vulnerable to well-armed, dedicated and elusive insurgents, a risk that will probably only worsen before and after the transfer of sovereignty, according to the American military.
The exposure of the Iraqi forces, most notably the police, stems from a knot of reasons, from their limited training and lack of equipment to the easy infiltration into the country of foreign fighters, Western and Iraqi security experts said. Complicating that is the speed of the transfer.
"It is so evident that they are nowhere close to being able to handle their own security," said one occupation official familiar with Iraqi forces. "Everyone has rushed to prepare them for July 1, and that's exactly what we have gotten: a rush. They're trying to put a Band-Aid on something, rather than doing the surgery," the official said.
Dan Senor, a spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority, denied in an interview with CNN today that the transfer was a "rush" or a "Band-Aid", but rather a plan that the Iraqi governing council had agreed to.
"This is not a Band-Aid," Mr. Senor said. "This isn't a temporary solution. It's about handing sovereignty over to the Iraqi people so they can move their country forward."
He said that there would be a security presence after the transfer but the country would no longer be "politically occupied."
Asked if he was concerned about the possibility of civil war in Iraq, he said: "It's something we have to monitor" but added that it was "not so much civil war, as ethnic tensions".
An American military spokesman said today that two American soldiers in convoys were killed in homemade bomb attacks in Baghdad and Baquba.
After major combat ended last year, the American-led occupation had to build or resurrect much of the Iraqi security structure from scratch. Looted police stations had been stripped of everything from cars to faucets. Police officers went most of the summer without radios, guns and uniforms. The Americans themselves chose to disband the army that served under Saddam Hussein and create a new one.
To bridge the gap between police work and defense, the occupation moved to create the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a unit that would bolster security along the lines of the American National Guard.
The occupation's goal is to have a security force of 226,700 Iraqis, according to the Brookings Institution, which tallied data from a Pentagon report of Dec. 30 titled "Draft Working Papers: Iraq Status."
That force would include 71,000 police officers, 40,000 civil defense corps members and an army of 40,000, although Brookings noted that it was not stated when these groups would reach full size. Many of the rest of the security force would do work like guarding ministries.
Last week began badly, with a suicide bombing at a police station in the central town of Iskandariya on Tuesday and a similar attack on Wednesday at an Iraqi Army recruiting post in central Baghdad. More than 100 people died in the attacks.
But insurgents showed a new level of organization and sophistication on Saturday when, armed with grenade launchers and heavy guns, they attacked a civil defense corps post and a police station in Falluja.
The armed bands freed 87 prisoners from the jail at the police station, said Ahmed Ibrahim, deputy minister of the interior. Among the casualties were three foreign attackers, according to American authorities.
In an interview with CNN today, Brig. Gen Mark Kimmitt, a spokesman for the coalition forces, was asked how he evaluated the state of Iraqi security forces after the Falluja attack.
He said Iraqi forces quickly established control in the Falluja attack after requesting that coalition forces let them do the work alone, a type of initiative that Iraqi forces were taking more often throughout the country, recognising that "the coalition will stand by them and be there when needed."
High-level Iraqi officials tried to dismiss the threat of more attacks like the one in Falluja, saying that the assault did not reveal poor preparedness or a heightened threat of terrorism. "It was a bunch of criminals who tried to free prisoners," Mr. Ibrahim said. "They were gangsters, not terrorists."
Mr. Ibrahim emphasized, as did American officials, that it was the Iraqi police, not the Americans, who on Sunday captured Muhammad Zimam Abdul-Razzaq, the former interior minister and No. 41 on the allies' most-wanted list.
But Western security experts take a different lesson from the Falluja raids. Much of the American rationale for rapidly turning over the policing role is that the Iraqis are better able to recognize the terrorists, many of them foreigners, who weave through Iraqi society. But Falluja dealt a blow to such faith in Iraqi intelligence-gathering.
Ayad Allawi, a Governing Council member, indicated at a press conference that Falluja's police may have suffered from the decision of the Americans to stay at the edge of town. "This created a gap for the terrorists to attack the police station," he said. "We want more communication, and we want the police force to be better equipped."
Allied diplomats, the military and the Iraqi police contend that improvements like that will take time, of which there is little.
Jeffrey B. White, who worked for the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency for almost 35 years and is now an associate with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that training security forces could take years.
"I think in the long term, there will be a very violent political climate in Iraq," said Mr. White, who visited Iraq this month, "and the security forces of the new government will have a difficult time dealing with that." |
