A town without law, much less
order By Iason Athanasiadis
BAQOUBA, Iraq - It was 9 o'clock on a
balmy spring evening when an informant called an
intelligence tip in to the Joint Coordination and
Control (JCC) office at the US outpost in central
Baqouba. He had information of an imminent
terrorist attack: a silver Korean minibus operated
by insurgents would be exploded the next day
inside the town.
It was the kind of news
that should cause at least a flurry of activity.
But in a country where jaded local and American
law-enforcement officers watch car bombs going off
daily, the
information was merely
radioed in to headquarters and presumably
forgotten about. By the end of the next day, the
minibus had yet to explode. Perhaps the tip-off
was misinformation, perhaps the threat was
neutralized. But the small victory was lost amid
the flood of terrorist activity coursing across
the troubled province of Diyala throughout the
day.
"Right now, it's chaos," said Dr
Thaer Kudier, one of the locals working as an
interpreter and problem-solver for the Americans
in Baqouba. "There's no law, there are no
restraints. So there's raping, stealing, killings,
carjackings. They [former Ba'athists involved in the
insurgency] are exploiting the circumstances for
revenge."
This is the situation into which
the fledgling Iraqi police are expected to step
and impose order. According to US-supplied
statistics, 2,000 officers in the new police force
used to work in the Saddam Hussein-era police,
with another 6,000 fresh recruits holding no
Ba'athist affiliation.
Most entrants are
sent to US-run police academies in the stable
northern Iraqi city of Soleymaniyeh or the
Jordanian capital Amman. There they receive 10
weeks of training before returning to Iraq to
assume their duties. A SWAT (special weapons and
tactics) school in Baghdad was discontinued this
summer by the State Department because of lack of
funding.
"We're just standing back and
saying we're here if they need us, but after
August they'll be in control of their own
destiny," said Major Michael Humphreys, a public
affairs officer at Camp Warhorse outside Baqouba.
That is when the province could collapse
into vicious civil war. Now is a transitional time
for the oil-rich, mixed Sunni-Shi'ite Diyala
province that borders Iran, and the US presence is
possibly the only thing stopping the different
sectarian groups from openly fighting each other.
Increasingly, responsibility is being handing over
to the Iraqi army and police in a process the US
hopes will culminate in its withdrawing into
well-fortified, strategically placed bases. But in
the organizational rethinking currently under way,
quick responses are not in vogue, and cooperation
is minimal between the longer-established Iraqi
army and the weak and often infiltrated police
forces, which the army holds in contempt.
The US Army's continuing inability to find
credible Iraqi partners to which it can hand over
swaths of civil-strife-racked countryside,
villages and towns is causing the Pentagon
increasing concern. In two weeks spent inside a
network of US military bases - from the oil-rich
northern city of Kirkuk to the troubled capital
and finally Diyala, the second-most-violent
province in Iraq - it became clear that the
Pentagon is anxious to retreat inside several
sprawling bases and away from the mounting chaos
gripping central Iraq.
Minimizing the
number of dead US soldiers even as tens of
thousands of troops are slated to be sent home in
the run-up to mid-term US elections at the end of
this year is similarly calculated to allay the
domestic political pressure on the administration
of President George W Bush to disengage from Iraq.
"They [the people of Diyala] understand
that we're going to leave some time," said
Lieutenant-Colonel William Benson, the commander
of the US detachment in central Baqouba. "What's
allowed us to draw down is that the Iraqi army and
police have stepped up. Especially the Iraqi army
has realized that it can beat the insurgents and
now have them on the run."
The attrition
rate for the Iraqi police is formidable. As US
casualties decrease, attacks targeting Iraqi
government employees are on the rise. The US Army
does not keep track of Iraqi deaths, but a
high-ranking official expressed frustration at the
large number of policemen killed almost daily in
drive-by shootings and car bombs targeting police
stations and their homes. Each death means 10
weeks of expensive training lost.
"We're
setting up tracking mechanisms ... [that] allow us
to see when their numbers need to get replenished
after a particularly high period of attrition,"
said Major Harvinder Singh. "I feel bad for them
because they're the main target now over us."
This has been the objective all along: to
turn the country over to the Iraqis while
maintaining a number of semi-permanent bases on
Iraqi soil that will allow the Pentagon to
maintain a strategic overview of the region.
Already, the sprawling Camp Victory in Baghdad and
Camp Speicher in Tikrit have a semi-permanent
feel, with the bases in Kirkuk, al-Asad and Balad
not far behind.
Most US officials
interviewed claimed marked improvement in the
conduct of the Iraqi police but admitted that they
would be unable to maintain order effectively
should the US pull out tomorrow. Two platoons of
US military police in Baqouba and another in the
nearby town of Muqtadiyah will be pulled out by
the end of the year, giving Iraqi police free rein
to conduct raids and round up suspects, with only
advisory teams to back them up. US officials fear
that these teams will not be enough to counter the
effect of infiltration and sectarian animosity.
"If the coalition is there on these joint
raids, there's more trust from the locals that
they won't be mistreated," said Benson. "The Iraqi
police have a long way to go."
While
monthly police salaries have risen from the meager
$30 offered under Saddam to an eminently
respectable $400, corruption is still widespread,
and there is growing evidence that the insurgents
active in Diyala province have penetrated the
ranks of the police.
"The defense and
military institutions have been so successfully
penetrated that whenever the Americans decide to
mount an operation, news reaches the people
cooperating with the insurgents and they take
precautions," said an Iraqi translator at Camp
Warhorse who called himself "George".
"We've now got a second power running
things here, alongside the existing government."
The brother of Diyala's police chief was
arrested by Interior Ministry officials after the
attack on the Muqtadiyah police station amid talk
that he had been leading one of the branches of
the insurgency.
Iraqi security officials
in Diyala province interviewed for this article
said that a number of suspicious actions had
preceded the attack, including the removal of
roof-mounted machine-guns and the reduction of
police personnel on duty. Both actions were
carried out by command of the chief of the police
station who is suspected of links to insurgents.
Diyala's command center is ground zero for
gauging the rampant violence sweeping through the
town outside. Phones ring every few minutes to
report another abduction, drive-by shooting,
suspected roadside bomb or detonated car-bomb. On
March 30 alone, 25 incidents were reported,
including a bicycle bomb, several kidnappings and
drive-by shootings, three roadside bomb explosions
and the discovery and defusing of several more.
The next day there were only 10 incidents, a low
for the troubled area, but they included the
potentially inflammatory killing of one Sunni
sheikh and the abduction of another.
With
several of the current police officials being
known former Ba'athists who have family or tribal
links to the insurgency, the obvious question
remains why the US military tolerates them. For
Specialist Boscher, the duty sergeant at the
command center, the answer is simple.
"Sometimes you have to hold them even
closer."
Iason Athanasiadis is
an Iran-based correspondent.
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involved in the
insurgency] are exploiting the circumstances for
revenge." 
