Nickdfresh
10-21-2006, 08:11 PM
October 22, 2006
On Baghdad Streets, a Police Partnership Falters
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
BAGHDAD, Oct. 21 — When Lt. Col. John Norris led his Stryker battalion to the Baya district of Baghdad last month he planned to work hand in glove with the Iraqi police. But no sooner did he venture onto the streets than he discovered that the police who were to be his partners were part of the problem.
As his Stryker command vehicle drove along a crowded avenue Colonel Norris spied several Shiite women in black abayas wailing over a body sprawled near a mosque as distraught relatives smeared the dead man’s blood on their faces. The American officer tried to wave down an Iraqi National Police truck for help, but the driver gave him an icy stare and kept going.
“I was disgusted by that,” Colonel Norris recalled.
An investigation by the American battalion later determined that the murder victim was a Sunni army captain visiting his family while on leave.
He had been shot in the head and neck by two men armed with 9-millimeter pistols who escaped in a white van that drove unchallenged through a National Police checkpoint less than 200 yards away.
On Thursday, the American command acknowledged that the Baghdad security plan had yet to stem the escalating bloodshed in the city. A week spent with American units demonstrated a major reason: After spending billions on building up Iraqi forces, and making withdrawal contingent on that buildup, the Americans have discovered that many of the Iraqi security forces are still not ready to handle security on their own. Throughout much of the city many Iraqis do not trust their own police forces.
The American military operation to reduce the sectarian killings in Baghdad and avert a full-fledged civil war has focused on about a dozen neighborhoods where the bodies of tortured victims have been found in sewage-filled lots, civilians have been killed in drive-by shootings and sectarian-inspired kidnappings have soared.
The strategy is to use American and Iraqi forces to clear neighborhoods of violent militias, insurgent groups and arms caches, then hold them with security forces so that essential services can be restored and reconstruction can eventually begin. Two months into the operation, it is the “hold” phase that has run into trouble, partly because it depends on the Iraqi security forces to win the trust of the population and establish the rule of law.
The Iraqi Army only provided two of the six battalions of additional troops that the Americans had requested to carry out the operation, known as Together Forward II, which means that with 15,600 Americans and 9,600 Iraqis, there are more American soldiers involved in the operation than Iraqi troops.
More than 30,000 National Police and regular police officers are also involved, but they are of uneven quality and some units have been infiltrated by the very militiamen they are supposed to control. American troops have been sorting the good policemen from the bad the hard way: on the streets of Baghdad, as they try to stop the spiraling sectarian killings.
An Extended Mission
Before Colonel Norris’s unit arrived in Baghdad, his mechanized infantry battalion, the Fourth Battalion of the 23rd Infantry, was no stranger to Iraq. Its troops had secured Mosul, Tal Afar and Rawa before its yearlong tour of duty was extended by commanders eager to bring reinforcements to Baghdad.
Of his 644 soldiers, 200 had already returned to their home base in Alaska and another 100 were in Kuwait waiting to go home when they were ordered back to Iraq. The extension of the mission entailed hardship and sacrifice. Only one soldier in the battalion has been killed in the line of duty, by a sniper in Baghdad.
After conducting clearing operations in Ghazaliya, Adhamiya and other neighborhoods, the battalion was dispatched to the Baya district. They had worked well with Iraqi security forces and hoped for more of the same in their new sector.
The murder scene Colonel Norris stumbled upon on Oct. 1, the unit’s first day in Baya, was a rude introduction to much tougher problems ahead. Although the battalion did not know it at the time, that same day 22 Iraqis were accosted at a Sunni-owned meat-packing plant. According to some witnesses, the assailants wore woodlawn-pattern camouflage uniforms and carried Glock pistols, which are customarily used by the National Police. They checked identity documents to separate the Sunnis from the Shiites. The Sunnis were blindfolded, thrown into meat trucks and driven off. Seven were shot and six of them died.
American military officers suspect the attack was instigated by the Shiite militia the Mahdi Army of Moktada al-Sadr, with the active or tacit support of the Second Battalion of the Eighth Brigade of the National Police. “The statistics indicate that they were doing nothing to support security,” Colonel Norris said, referring to the police unit. “They were either responsible for the murders or were allowing them to happen.”
The assault set off an uproar in the neighborhood. The next day a group of Sunnis lobbed four mortar shells and fired machine guns at a National Police checkpoint. That was followed by an angry demonstration. The very policemen who were supposed to help the Americans keep the lid on the sectarian strife in Baya had stoked old animosities.
Faced with a deteriorating security situation, Maj. Gen. J. D. Thurman, the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division and the senior American commander in Baghdad, recommended that the National Police unit be withdrawn and retrained. On his second day in his new sector, Colonel Norris had the delicate task of informing the unit that it was relieved of its duties.
He said he expected that the police would be replaced by an Iraq Army unit, a move he hoped would be more acceptable to residents. But Iraqi soldiers were in short supply. He was informed that the new force would be another unit of the National Police. That posed a huge challenge, since the National Police had lost the trust of the Sunnis in the Baya area.
A Web of Police Forces
The Americans finally received some good news when they learned that the new National Police unit they would be working with was led by Col. Ali Ibrahim Daboun, a commander they knew from Ghazaliya. He impressed them when he provided a tip about two teenagers involved in transporting triggering devices for bombs, setting up a joint American and Iraqi raid in which they were apprehended.
But in the balkanized network of Iraqi law enforcement Colonel Ali was in charge of one of three police units in the area. The key was to weld the disparate police forces in the neighborhood into an effective force and rebuild public confidence in their work. This was no small problem because Sunni residents had continued to shoot at the National Police, killing one of Colonel Ali’s officers and wounding several others.
To encourage cooperation, Colonel Norris organized a meeting of tribal sheiks and neighborhood leaders. He did not tell the local officials that the police would be there for fear that would scare them away. At the meeting, Sunni representatives railed against the police for failing to stop Shiite militia attacks or protect residents when notices were posted on their door warning them to flee or be killed.
Colonel Norris told the officials their complaints were justified. But he added that there was a new team in town and it wanted to make a fresh start. The neighborhood representatives were stunned. They did not know that the old police unit had been replaced.
Seeking to win over the representatives, Colonel Ali took the floor. He declared boldly that he was not a Shiite or a Sunni but an Iraqi and would enforce the law in an evenhanded way. With so many men running around in uniforms and renegade militias running rife, one participant asked how the citizens could tell the good policemen from the ones that meant them harm.
Colonel Ali offered advice that said a great deal about the long road ahead before Iraq’s forces can assume the main burden of protecting the country. If an Iraqi policeman comes to your door, he advised, you should not open it unless he is accompanied by an American soldier.
An Act of Charity
Colonel Norris said more local people had offered tips to the Americans and their Iraqi partners because residents had come to believe that the Americans wanted to help. New threats to the police from local militias, who used to count on their cooperation, are another indication of progress, he said.
But the American officials say it is clear that the Iraqi forces vitally depend on the Americans for backup. “They are extremely vulnerable,” Colonel Norris said of the Iraqi police. “The majority of force protection is provided by coalition forces.”
None of the improvements helped Latif Abdul Kathum Hilal Janabi, the owner of a cellphone shop and a member of a prominent Sunni tribe, who was killed by assailants when he resisted a kidnapping.
One of the assailants was killed and the other wounded by a guard from a nearby mosque. The wounded gunman was taken to a hospital but disappeared in the medical system. One policeman said he had heard that the assailant had been moved by his confederates to a hospital in Sadr City so he would be beyond the reach of the American-led coalition forces.
Capt. Matthew Albertus, the 30-year-old commander of Company A, was able to perform an act of charity. As he was leaving a police station, he spied the distressed wife of the murder victim who was waiting at the gate, the very picture of frustration. She had come to plead for help in getting the necessary paperwork to secure the release of her husband’s body from the morgue for burial, and it was not clear when she was going to get it.
Captain Albertus took matters into his own hands. He told the local police chief to get the documents, drove with him to the hospital in his armored vehicle and then insisted that the morgue take action. The murdered man’s wife sobbed as the body was placed in a simple plywood coffin. His father tried to choke back his tears. Then the coffin was tied to the roof of a Chevrolet Caprice.
Even hospitals can be dangerous places these days because militias know they are gathering places for relatives. So Captain Albertus formed a convoy around the car and then drove through Baghdad so the grieving relatives could make their way through the city streets and checkpoints. Nobody could stop the men who took Mr. Janabi’s life, but the Americans provided the final escort.
Link (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/world/middleeast/22baghdad.html?hp&ex=1161489600&en=9f26c6ea6dbc86a2&ei=5094&partner=homepage)
On Baghdad Streets, a Police Partnership Falters
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
BAGHDAD, Oct. 21 — When Lt. Col. John Norris led his Stryker battalion to the Baya district of Baghdad last month he planned to work hand in glove with the Iraqi police. But no sooner did he venture onto the streets than he discovered that the police who were to be his partners were part of the problem.
As his Stryker command vehicle drove along a crowded avenue Colonel Norris spied several Shiite women in black abayas wailing over a body sprawled near a mosque as distraught relatives smeared the dead man’s blood on their faces. The American officer tried to wave down an Iraqi National Police truck for help, but the driver gave him an icy stare and kept going.
“I was disgusted by that,” Colonel Norris recalled.
An investigation by the American battalion later determined that the murder victim was a Sunni army captain visiting his family while on leave.
He had been shot in the head and neck by two men armed with 9-millimeter pistols who escaped in a white van that drove unchallenged through a National Police checkpoint less than 200 yards away.
On Thursday, the American command acknowledged that the Baghdad security plan had yet to stem the escalating bloodshed in the city. A week spent with American units demonstrated a major reason: After spending billions on building up Iraqi forces, and making withdrawal contingent on that buildup, the Americans have discovered that many of the Iraqi security forces are still not ready to handle security on their own. Throughout much of the city many Iraqis do not trust their own police forces.
The American military operation to reduce the sectarian killings in Baghdad and avert a full-fledged civil war has focused on about a dozen neighborhoods where the bodies of tortured victims have been found in sewage-filled lots, civilians have been killed in drive-by shootings and sectarian-inspired kidnappings have soared.
The strategy is to use American and Iraqi forces to clear neighborhoods of violent militias, insurgent groups and arms caches, then hold them with security forces so that essential services can be restored and reconstruction can eventually begin. Two months into the operation, it is the “hold” phase that has run into trouble, partly because it depends on the Iraqi security forces to win the trust of the population and establish the rule of law.
The Iraqi Army only provided two of the six battalions of additional troops that the Americans had requested to carry out the operation, known as Together Forward II, which means that with 15,600 Americans and 9,600 Iraqis, there are more American soldiers involved in the operation than Iraqi troops.
More than 30,000 National Police and regular police officers are also involved, but they are of uneven quality and some units have been infiltrated by the very militiamen they are supposed to control. American troops have been sorting the good policemen from the bad the hard way: on the streets of Baghdad, as they try to stop the spiraling sectarian killings.
An Extended Mission
Before Colonel Norris’s unit arrived in Baghdad, his mechanized infantry battalion, the Fourth Battalion of the 23rd Infantry, was no stranger to Iraq. Its troops had secured Mosul, Tal Afar and Rawa before its yearlong tour of duty was extended by commanders eager to bring reinforcements to Baghdad.
Of his 644 soldiers, 200 had already returned to their home base in Alaska and another 100 were in Kuwait waiting to go home when they were ordered back to Iraq. The extension of the mission entailed hardship and sacrifice. Only one soldier in the battalion has been killed in the line of duty, by a sniper in Baghdad.
After conducting clearing operations in Ghazaliya, Adhamiya and other neighborhoods, the battalion was dispatched to the Baya district. They had worked well with Iraqi security forces and hoped for more of the same in their new sector.
The murder scene Colonel Norris stumbled upon on Oct. 1, the unit’s first day in Baya, was a rude introduction to much tougher problems ahead. Although the battalion did not know it at the time, that same day 22 Iraqis were accosted at a Sunni-owned meat-packing plant. According to some witnesses, the assailants wore woodlawn-pattern camouflage uniforms and carried Glock pistols, which are customarily used by the National Police. They checked identity documents to separate the Sunnis from the Shiites. The Sunnis were blindfolded, thrown into meat trucks and driven off. Seven were shot and six of them died.
American military officers suspect the attack was instigated by the Shiite militia the Mahdi Army of Moktada al-Sadr, with the active or tacit support of the Second Battalion of the Eighth Brigade of the National Police. “The statistics indicate that they were doing nothing to support security,” Colonel Norris said, referring to the police unit. “They were either responsible for the murders or were allowing them to happen.”
The assault set off an uproar in the neighborhood. The next day a group of Sunnis lobbed four mortar shells and fired machine guns at a National Police checkpoint. That was followed by an angry demonstration. The very policemen who were supposed to help the Americans keep the lid on the sectarian strife in Baya had stoked old animosities.
Faced with a deteriorating security situation, Maj. Gen. J. D. Thurman, the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division and the senior American commander in Baghdad, recommended that the National Police unit be withdrawn and retrained. On his second day in his new sector, Colonel Norris had the delicate task of informing the unit that it was relieved of its duties.
He said he expected that the police would be replaced by an Iraq Army unit, a move he hoped would be more acceptable to residents. But Iraqi soldiers were in short supply. He was informed that the new force would be another unit of the National Police. That posed a huge challenge, since the National Police had lost the trust of the Sunnis in the Baya area.
A Web of Police Forces
The Americans finally received some good news when they learned that the new National Police unit they would be working with was led by Col. Ali Ibrahim Daboun, a commander they knew from Ghazaliya. He impressed them when he provided a tip about two teenagers involved in transporting triggering devices for bombs, setting up a joint American and Iraqi raid in which they were apprehended.
But in the balkanized network of Iraqi law enforcement Colonel Ali was in charge of one of three police units in the area. The key was to weld the disparate police forces in the neighborhood into an effective force and rebuild public confidence in their work. This was no small problem because Sunni residents had continued to shoot at the National Police, killing one of Colonel Ali’s officers and wounding several others.
To encourage cooperation, Colonel Norris organized a meeting of tribal sheiks and neighborhood leaders. He did not tell the local officials that the police would be there for fear that would scare them away. At the meeting, Sunni representatives railed against the police for failing to stop Shiite militia attacks or protect residents when notices were posted on their door warning them to flee or be killed.
Colonel Norris told the officials their complaints were justified. But he added that there was a new team in town and it wanted to make a fresh start. The neighborhood representatives were stunned. They did not know that the old police unit had been replaced.
Seeking to win over the representatives, Colonel Ali took the floor. He declared boldly that he was not a Shiite or a Sunni but an Iraqi and would enforce the law in an evenhanded way. With so many men running around in uniforms and renegade militias running rife, one participant asked how the citizens could tell the good policemen from the ones that meant them harm.
Colonel Ali offered advice that said a great deal about the long road ahead before Iraq’s forces can assume the main burden of protecting the country. If an Iraqi policeman comes to your door, he advised, you should not open it unless he is accompanied by an American soldier.
An Act of Charity
Colonel Norris said more local people had offered tips to the Americans and their Iraqi partners because residents had come to believe that the Americans wanted to help. New threats to the police from local militias, who used to count on their cooperation, are another indication of progress, he said.
But the American officials say it is clear that the Iraqi forces vitally depend on the Americans for backup. “They are extremely vulnerable,” Colonel Norris said of the Iraqi police. “The majority of force protection is provided by coalition forces.”
None of the improvements helped Latif Abdul Kathum Hilal Janabi, the owner of a cellphone shop and a member of a prominent Sunni tribe, who was killed by assailants when he resisted a kidnapping.
One of the assailants was killed and the other wounded by a guard from a nearby mosque. The wounded gunman was taken to a hospital but disappeared in the medical system. One policeman said he had heard that the assailant had been moved by his confederates to a hospital in Sadr City so he would be beyond the reach of the American-led coalition forces.
Capt. Matthew Albertus, the 30-year-old commander of Company A, was able to perform an act of charity. As he was leaving a police station, he spied the distressed wife of the murder victim who was waiting at the gate, the very picture of frustration. She had come to plead for help in getting the necessary paperwork to secure the release of her husband’s body from the morgue for burial, and it was not clear when she was going to get it.
Captain Albertus took matters into his own hands. He told the local police chief to get the documents, drove with him to the hospital in his armored vehicle and then insisted that the morgue take action. The murdered man’s wife sobbed as the body was placed in a simple plywood coffin. His father tried to choke back his tears. Then the coffin was tied to the roof of a Chevrolet Caprice.
Even hospitals can be dangerous places these days because militias know they are gathering places for relatives. So Captain Albertus formed a convoy around the car and then drove through Baghdad so the grieving relatives could make their way through the city streets and checkpoints. Nobody could stop the men who took Mr. Janabi’s life, but the Americans provided the final escort.
Link (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/world/middleeast/22baghdad.html?hp&ex=1161489600&en=9f26c6ea6dbc86a2&ei=5094&partner=homepage)