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thedrifter
07-25-06, 02:57 PM
July 31, 2006
Ace in the hole
Rawah police chief’s ability to hold force together proves he’s an uncommon asset

By Sean D. Naylor
Staff writer

RAWAH, Iraq — Capt. Mohammed Abdalwahab is sitting at ground zero of the war in this part of Anbar province, but he doesn’t look the least bit perturbed.

From behind a broad wooden desk, the tall, lean, mustachioed officer in a well-fitting blue police uniform is interrogating a blindfolded insurgent suspect between nonchalant puffs on a cigarette.

Minutes earlier, the suspect had been defiant in the face of questioning by U.S. soldiers who had sneaked up on him at the fruit stand he operated in town. But now, as Abdalwahab peppers him with questions, the 21-year-old suspect has become subdued and defensive. There’s no doubt as to who is in control.


Observing the interrogation, a U.S. Army tactical human intelligence team leader who asked not to be identified said the young suspect is right to be scared.

“One of the IPs [Iraqi Police] was in the market on his day off, and [the suspect] ran out of his store and told him, ‘If you don’t quit, we’re going to kill you and your family,’” he said.

Now the tables are turned.

“If you don’t give me enough information, I’ll hand you to the [Iraqi] army, and you know what they’ll do,” Abdalwahab tells the suspect. Behind him, a smiling police lieutenant grabs a length of wood and pretends to beat the soles of the suspect’s feet.

“If he’s going to crack, he’s going to crack with these guys, not with us,” the Army humint team leader, a staff sergeant, said.

The year of the police

In this town of 20,000 on the north bank of the Euphrates River, the majority of the 99 percent Sunni population either supports the insurgency or has been cowed into silence by intimidation and threats from terrorist groups.

Abdalwahab is the Rawah chief of police, which makes him the most important man in the counterinsurgency fight here — and the insurgents’ top target. The very fact that Rawah has a police force at all makes it, and Abdalwahab, stand out.

Counterinsurgency experts see an effective, locally recruited police force as an essential bulwark against the guerrillas. The policemen’s status as locals means people are more likely to trust them with information, giving them a unique ability to figure out what’s going on in a town or a district.

“We don’t have the ability to immediately recognize a different dialect, a different tribe, a different family,” said Marine Lt. Col. Ron Gridley, executive officer of Regimental Combat Team 7, which operates across western Anbar.

But the establishment of a viable national police force in Iraq has stumbled. While top U.S. officials in Iraq declared 2006 “the year of the police,” reports from around Iraq indicate that challenges remain.

The police fall under the Shiite-dominated Ministry of the Interior, and in Baghdad and Basra, the line between the Iraqi police and Shiite militia death squads has grown very fuzzy.

Meanwhile, in Anbar, the authorities have found it almost impossible to stand up a police force. An insurgent campaign of murder and intimidation aimed at dissuading Iraqis from joining the police has complicated recruiting across the province.

The insurgents’ efforts at scaring away potential recruits have been so successful in the “triad area” of Barwana, Hadithah and Haqlaniyah that the coalition has been unable to recruit any police in those towns, according to Gridley.

“People are afraid for their lives,” Gridley said. “Nobody wants to get their head cut off, quite frankly.”

Breaking the code

This has left the coalition and the Iraqi government facing a Catch-22 situation: An effective Iraqi police force is needed to bring security to towns along the Euphrates, but the lack of security in those towns makes recruiting that police force almost impossible.

In Rawah, however, the coalition appears to have broken the code of how to stand up a police force — and much of that has to do with the captain’s dynamic leadership.

Born and bred in Rawah, Abdalwahab moved to Baghdad at age 20, attended military and language schools and, in 2000, was commissioned as an infantry officer in Saddam Hussein’s army.

He was working as a staff officer in Baghdad when the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam in 2003. With the Iraqi army disbanded, Abdalwahab moved to the frontier town of Husaybah to take a job with the newly formed border police, which worked closely with the U.S. Marines in western Iraq.

Meanwhile, Lt. Col. Mark Freitag, commander of the U.S. Army’s 4th Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment — the unit responsible for Rawah and the surrounding area — was keen to get a police force up and running in Rawah before the squadron’s yearlong deployment finished in the summer.

Through the fall and winter, Freitag’s outfit had worked aggressively to reduce insurgent influence in Rawah. Roadside bomb attacks declined from 54 in October to 18 in March, when the squadron conducted its first recruiting drive for the Rawah police.

“We had set the conditions for success by reducing that insurgency,” said Capt. Andrew Decker, 4-14’s intelligence officer. “People were tentative, but they ... decided, ‘OK, we’ll give this a try.’”

Abdalwahab heard about the recruiting drive while visiting his sister in Rawah. He immediately put his name forward.

“I told them I know everyone in Rawah ... who the bad guys are and who the good guys are here,” he said.

His leadership qualities were apparent to Freitag, as were his anti-insurgent credentials.

“I’m against the insurgents 100 percent,” Abdalwahab said in a July 17 interview. “They don’t respect human rights and treat the people badly.”

Freitag ensured that Abdalwahab became the deputy police chief under a retired Iraqi army general who the Rawah city council had decided to make chief. But within days, the general got spooked and quit, running to Baghdad. Abdalwahab, who had been a first lieutenant when he left the Army, became chief by default.

It was a huge stroke of good fortune for coalition forces. Since March, Abdalwahab has led one of the few functional police forces in Anbar through sheer force of personality and is dismissive of the dangers he has volunteered to face.

“I know it is a risk to become chief of police here, but I want to make a good future for Rawah,” he said.

A total of 59 men were interviewed during the initial recruiting drive, of whom 41 were selected to become police. Of those, 31 showed up and attended a two-month training stint at the Iraqi Police academy in Jordan.

Their impact on the security situation upon their return was immediate. In recent months, “the quality and number of people providing us information has gone up exponentially,” said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Matt Gray, an analysis technician with 4-14. “People are just willing to talk to their own locals.”

Tips to the Iraqi police and the Iraqi army battalion partnered with 4-14 in Rawah now constitute the squadron’s most successful source of information on the insurgents, said Capt. Tom Hart, 4-14’s fire support officer.

As he has worked to mold the few dozen men who signed up into a professional police force, Abdalwahab has had a lot of help. His sergeant major, Khairy Naim Mohammed, has been invaluable, leading patrols when Abdalwahab’s duties as chief take him elsewhere.

Meanwhile, a 12-man team made up of 4-14 soldiers and civilian police officers on contract to the State Department spends every day at the police station training and mentoring the police.

“I can’t do the job all by myself,” he said. “All the team helps me do a great job.”

Insurgents fight back

The insurgents did not take the affront to their authority in Rawah lying down. Abu Jihad, one of al-Qaida in Iraq’s senior leaders in Anbar, “sent word to the mayor of Rawah that IPs would not be allowed to remain” in the town,” Decker said. “IPs in Rawah, in his mind, was a failure of his piece of the insurgency.”

Decker said the insurgents appeared to have focused on other areas along the Euphrates River valley, but they could not ignore a successful police recruiting drive.

The insurgents threatened police and their families, attacked the police station and posted fake “confessions” from policemen around town.

The police are the insurgents’ “number one target,” said Eloy Saenz, a retired Houston police officer who is one of three international police liaison officers helping to train the Rawah police. “If people come to have a sense of security, what happens? They open up the floodgates of communication. They now feel they have a trusted member of their community they can go to, to report bad activity.”

The insurgents’ campaign of intimidation climaxed June 5 when they kidnapped and beheaded an IP lieutenant. Virtually all of the police walked off the job. Abdalwahab, who had been on leave when the murder occurred, cut his brief vacation short and personally visited the homes of each of his men, essentially ordering them to get their gear and return to work. Within days, the force had reconstituted itself.

Of 42 IPs recruited so far, 28 remain on the job. One has been killed, several are missing, and the others decided that police work was not for them. The courage of those who remain has earned the respect of U.S. troops.

But the U.S. troops and police liaison officers are not yet prepared to let them conduct unilateral patrols. “I don’t think they’d last long,” Tiernan said.

U.S. officials here said the Rawah police enterprise is finely balanced.

“If the insurgents are successful in killing even one or two IPs, that has a bigger psychological effect on what we’re trying to do,” Saenz said.

U.S. forces therefore face a dilemma in how to use the police. Keeping them holed up in the police station sends a message that the insurgents still have the upper hand. But allowing the police to patrol exposes them to risks that the Americans believe could be fatal to their attempts to build up the IP force in Rawah.

U.S. forces have decided on a policy of “maximum exposure, minimum risk,” allowing the IPs to patrol on their own — but in areas that have been secured by nearby U.S. forces, Hart said.

U.S. officials agree that the one policeman they can’t afford to lose is Capt. Mohammed Abdalwahab.

He is, Saenz said, “the ace in the hole for this organization. He is an excellent leader. He’s a morale booster. He understands what his job is. He understands his own people. He has already dealt with one of the biggest blows that an insurgency can have on a police agency — to take out one of his officers. He was able to contain that, maintain the morale of his troops.”

Abdalwahab has so impressed the Americans that they are pushing to have him promoted to district police chief. Who would replace him has not been decided.

And that sums up one of the coalition’s major problems: Capt. Mohammeds are hard to find.

Sean Naylor covers the Army.

Ellie