A force for resistance
April 21, 2004
The smiling face of the Baghdad policeman was everywhere. But it's fast disappearing behind a crude coat of black paint as insurgents ratchet up the pressure on Iraqis desperate or courageous enough to work for the country's new security forces.
The smile and the smart new uniforms are on billboards promoting badly needed confidence in Iraq's police service crafted by the United States. It all has the hallmarks of a Madison Avenue PR campaign, but daily it comes up against harsh Iraqi realities - and by night it vanishes, billboard by billboard, behind the dribble of more paint bombs.
Captain Falah Hassam, 31, might have been the billboard's generic cop, but he has nothing to smile about. He had to buy his own uniform in Baghdad's Alawi markets; he doesn't even have a pistol, though his anti-terrorism work pits him against machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades; his self-esteem is being eroded by the blatant refusal of all ranks of Iraqis to respect the authority of the new service.
Hassam is on the verge of quitting.
It's hard enough in a stable democracy to reform or to reinvent a police force - look at the NSW police service. Think then of the challenge for the US and Iraqis in a country at war, a country in which tribal and religious authority openly mocks the smiling face on the billboard.
The blueprint for security in the new Iraq calls for a 75,000-strong national police service and a military of about 35,000 to deal with external threats. Thousands more are to patrol the borders and work in intelligence.
They've got the numbers. But they are ill equipped, morale is low and training is too short, too slow and inadequate. Those who are armed feel humiliated that they are trusted with only one ammunition clip at a time.
Until the death this month of hundreds of Iraqis in the battle for Falluja and during the Shiite uprising in the south, few of the recruits appreciated that the work would entail killing Iraqis - that was the job of the Americans, they thought. And now they are being infiltrated by the insurgency.
It is bad enough that many of them are accused of being cowardly - a battalion of the new Iraqi Civilian Defence Corps (ICDC) refused to fight alongside US forces at Falluja, despite being accompanied by US Special Forces operatives as a morale booster; those who joined the fight were confined to manning checkpoints and other menial tasks on the fringe of battle, or wore balaclavas to conceal their identity from other Iraqis.
But allegations of two particularly horrific incidents of infiltrators using the uniforms of the ICDC and the Iraqi police to work against the US-led occupation mean that now even the Americans are openly suspicious of the two services.
Blackwater USA, the private security firm that employed four Americans whose vehicles were incinerated and whose bodies were mutilated in an orgy of violence at Falluja on March 31, claims that the men were cleverly led into the ambush by an ICDC escort which was supposed to protect them.
Patrick Toohey, a senior Blackwater executive, says the ICDC vehicles blocked the main street of Falluja so that there was no escape for the Americans from waiting gunmen. "The truth is we got led into this ambush. We were set up," he says.
The US military is still investigating the incident, which sparked the American siege of Falluja - a powerful military assault in which more than 700 people died but which failed to capture the killers of the four Americans. But for Toohey, the only question to be resolved is whether the escort was made up of serving ICDC members or imposters.
The other incident was the murder last month, near Hilla, south of Baghdad, of two US civilians when a battered Iraqi taxi they believed gave them anonymity on dangerous roads was ambushed. Their attackers knew their movements too well - they were Iraqi police members from a station across the road from the women's centre at which the Americans worked in Hilla.
American talking heads have repeatedly declared confidence in the new Iraqi security services, as though the constant repetition might instil in the infant services the ability to maintain law and order after the June 30 handover of a still ill-defined form of sovereignty to Iraqis.
But the foreign occupation of Iraq will continue. Only a level of political control will come back to Iraqis - the huge US-led foreign military presence will continue, and the Americans also are determined to have long-term military bases in the country.
There is a risk in all of this that the authority and stature of the Iraqi services will continue to be dwarfed, surrounded as they are now - and will be - by the power of American guns, the swagger of well-armed private security contractors employed by the US and other foreign agencies and myriad Iraqi private armies and security outfits.
But worst is the intimidation from fellow Iraqis. The Americans were forced to confront failure after the ICDC mutiny at Falluja and the mass flight from their posts by Iraqi policemen when they came under attack in Baghdad and across the south of the country during the Shiite uprising.
Hundreds of policemen at Falluja defected to the insurgency when the US attacked. In the slum area of Sadr City and at Yarmuk, in the west of Baghdad, police officers resigned en masse rather than wage a "counter-terrorism war" against opponents of US rule.
They stood back and watched their stations ransacked of weapons, uniforms, vehicles and the limited equipment they had. They were - and still are - reluctant to challenge gunmen who wander the streets; and when they did return to their posts, it was only after negotiations - not with the Iraqi Governing Council of the US authorities, but with those behind the uprising.
President George Bush spoke about it: "I was disappointed in the performance of some of the troops."
And the Pentagon responded: only eight weeks after he left Iraq, one of the Army's top officers, Major-General David H. Petraeus, is being sent back to bolster the training and equipping of Iraqi security forces.
General John P. Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East, dealt with some of the issues publicly: "Some of it has to do with leadership, some of it has to do with vetting, some of it has to do with training. But most of it has to do with time and confidence, which is what we're going to have to work on the most."
Most senior US officials have tried to praise the performance of Iraqis who have performed well. But a particular criticism of Abizaid's was cutting: "They did not stand up to the intimidators."
Members of the ICDC and the Iraqi police regularly receive written death threats or intimidatory visits at their homes. Sergeant Tahir Ahmed Hamid, of the ICDC, told the Herald that the previous day a friend had received this blunt warning: "Leave your job - or be killed."
Captain Hassam, the cop without a pistol who wears a uniform he bought himself, was full of despondency and anecdotes to back it up.
Lighting up another cigarette, he said: "Even when I was coming to see you today, I told some people to get away from the hotel - they refused and told me they would only take orders from the Americans.
"How do you think that makes me feel? And the paint-bombing of the posters is such an insult - we have zero authority." But as he talked it emerged that the problem is more complex. "We can't tell a tribal sheik or a mosque imam what to do - they tell us what to do."
He made his point graphically, telling the story of a clash in a Baghdad suburb during which an Iraqi policeman fired shots in the air to disperse a crowd - just as he was joined by US forces, he said, whose gunfire killed a man in the crowd.
"The sheik of the dead man's tribe decided that the Iraqi policeman killed him and demanded that he must pay tribal compensation for the death - and if he doesn't the tribe will mount a revenge killing against him.
"This is why so many Iraqi police sit in their homes instead of going to work. I say that maybe 35 per cent of all the new policemen have quit. And for some Iraqi police and soldiers, it's easier to go and fight with the resistance against the Americans than to stay in the police and the army and fight Iraqis."
The irony was lost on Hassam when he recounted a colleague's tale of being confronted in a police station by an insurgency demand that the police abandon their posts so that the anti-US forces could take over. The opening line from the insurgents was the same as that from George Bush to the world after September 11: "You are with us or you are against us."
Later I had tea with two Shiite ICDC soldiers who insisted that professionalism was foremost, until I asked if they would accept orders to fight alongside the US - against the Sunni insurgents in Falluja or the Shiite fighters at Najaf. In other words, could they kill Iraqis?
"Oh, we wouldn't be asked," one of them parried.
What did they think of others refusing to go? "That's their decision."
Were they discomforted by the news from Falluja? Pause. There was much debate between them in Arabic, before one of them came back lamely: "We need more time to think about this."
But surely this was a hot topic of discussion in the ranks? "No. We don't discuss it."
Finally, they thought they had me in a corner. The fighting had died down at Falluja, where the targets would have been Sunnis. But US forces were then massing for a possible attack on Najaf, where their guns would be pointed at their fellow Shiites, so I wondered if they would obey orders to go to Najaf.
"If the Americans attack Najaf, come back and ask me," one of them said, and the other chimed in too quickly: "That's an intelligent answer, isn't it?"
This story was found at: smh.com.au
(Putting in their link was a nice touch; no cutting, no pasting) |
