thedrifter
06-04-07, 06:56 PM
Moment of truth
U.S. troops guide Iraqi police as they hit the streets
By Sean D. Naylor - snaylor@militarytimes.com
Posted : June 11, 2007
BAGHDAD — Maj. Qussim was scared, too scared to give his full name to a reporter.
As the police officer shifted uneasily in the vinyl chair behind his desk, his fear was palpable but not irrational. His boss, the chief of the Khadra police station in western Baghdad, a Sunni officer like himself, had been killed the previous week, joining three other Sunni officers from the station who had fallen in the line of duty since the demise of Saddam Hussein.
“Al-Qaida controls this area,” said Qussim, a shift supervisor. “It’s so dangerous.”
As with local law enforcement assets in any counterinsurgency, Iraqi policemen such as Qussim should be playing a critical role in the fight against al-Qaida in Iraq, homegrown Sunni insurgent groups and Shiite militias. By providing a presence on streets where they were raised, police officers can identify someone who seems out of place earlier than can troops from out of town, while acting as a trusted conduit through which locals can pass along information.
That, at least, is the theory. But the Iraqi police — “IPs” — have been hobbled by a tarnished history, perceptions of sectarian bias and an almost total lack of preparedness.
And they are paying a heavy price. Last year, attacks killed more than 600 Iraqi police and wounded another 1,400, said Col. Mike Galloucis, commander of the 89th Military Police Brigade. The equivalent figures for this year are on track to equal or exceed that toll, he added.
With speculation among U.S. officers here rife that American troop strength in Baghdad will fall dramatically over the next two years, leaving Iraqi security forces on their own, Galloucis’ troops are at the forefront of a desperate effort to give the IPs a fighting chance.
The Iraqi police force has an 86-year history, but it has not always been a proud one. Under Saddam, the force had a reputation for corruption and was considered the least prestigious of Iraq’s security forces.
Now, the U.S., with Galloucis’ MPs in the lead, is trying to turn it into a community police force, using squad-sized police transition teams to work with IPs. Galloucis has carved about 200 police transition teams out of his force.
“A company will provide up to nine PTTs,” said Capt. Jason Sama, commander of the brigade’s 410th Military Police Company.
Since December, his nine teams have covered the 12 IP stations in west Baghdad’s Mansour and Abu Ghraib districts, which in turn are responsible for policing a population he estimated at between 200,000 and 300,000.
Ten international police advisers under a different chain of command assist Sama’s company in training the IPs. While the advisers focus on liaising with the station chief and giving hands-on and classroom instruction, the MPs concentrate on leader development, logistics and force protection, while also helping with training that focuses as much on “survival skills for the street,” such as weapons handling and tactical movement, as it does on basic police skills, said 1st Lt. Megan Williams, Sama’s 2nd Platoon leader.
The IP force the 89th’s MPs encountered was organized into “local” or “station” police who acted like firefighters, waiting in their station for trouble to be reported; “patrol police” (as U.S. troops call them) who walked or drove the beat; traffic police; a highway patrol force; and a criminal investigation division made up of detectives.
A separate organization, the Iraqi National Police, is a paramilitary force created by the Iraqi government under the Ministry of the Interior as a counterweight to the Iraqi army.
Because most IPs are station police, U.S. troops placed great emphasis on ridding them of their reactive mind-set and getting them out on the streets — which came as a rude shock for many.
“For them, it’s a new thing to go out and patrol,” said Staff Sgt. Eddie Romero, 2nd Squad leader in Sama’s 1st Platoon and the police transition team leader for the Khadra IP station.
But when the IPs head out onto the streets, they do so in police cars and soft-skinned Chevrolet pickup trucks that are vulnerable to small-arms fire, let alone the powerful improvised explosive devices that can destroy much more heavily armored vehicles.
“The biggest equipment shortcoming they have is the lack of hardened vehicles,” Galloucis said. “They would benefit enormously from having a hardened vehicle.”
Other MPs agreed. “The threat that’s outside these gates is not made for a civilian car,” said Romero, who was wounded four days later in an incident that killed another MP and an interpreter.
But the Iraqis don’t do a good job of maintaining the equipment they get, Romero said. “Since we gave control back to the Iraqis, it’s been very difficult; ... a lot of their supply systems are broken and corrupt,” he said.
‘We can’t shadow them’
The PTTs are similar in many respects to the military transition teams that assist the Iraqi army, but there are key differences. Although each MTT is led by a field-grade officer one rank below the commander of the Iraqi unit to which the MTT is attached, most PTTs are led by noncommissioned officers who do not have the same prestige in the Iraqi security forces that they enjoy in the U.S. Army.
The reason for this is simple, Galloucis said: There just aren’t enough MPs to go around. “If you look at the number of MP requirements worldwide, and the number of MP units [available] to meet those requirements, there’s always a delta,” he said.
Although the military transition teams often play a strong role in guiding the actions of their Iraqi counterparts, Sama said he sees the role of PTT members as being that of “enablers.”
“We enable them to be able to maybe look at systems in a different way,” he said. “The intent behind these transition teams was to allow these guys to take the lead.”
“We’re there as advisers,” Williams said. “We can’t shadow them, because we want them to do their jobs — we don’t want to inhibit them. My district commander [is a full colonel who] has been an IP for 23 years. He’s ... going to look at me and say, ‘This is a 23-year-old female lieutenant from the United States. What is she going to tell me that I haven’t seen or done?’ “
But changing the bureaucratic culture here is essential if the Iraqi police’s potential is to be realized, said Galloucis, who liaises daily with the Iraqi police force’s most senior generals.
“Far too many things in this country are still too centrally controlled,” he said, with decisions that should be made at the station level still being referred “to the highest levels. ... [N]o one takes responsibility.”
For the Iraqi police’s chain of command, the “highest levels” are in the Shiite-dominated Ministry of Interior, where officials are apparently keen to exercise direct control of their police.
“Every one of my [five] stations has changed commanders more than once” since December, Williams said.
Part of the problem, the IPs told her, was that the Interior Ministry ordered “a blanket firing” of all IP officers of a certain rank who had been members of the Sunni-dominated Ba’ath Party under Saddam.
The ministry has its “own system of doing business,” Sama said. “We don’t see the reasons behind the movement of a commander.”
But despite the ministry’s machinations, police chiefs are quick to rebut allegations of sectarian bias, or suggestions that some police are loyal to Shiite militias such as Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.
Col. Rahim Jabar Fahad, 42, police chief of the Mansour district, said there is little sectarian tension between his police and the communities they serve because most police are from the neighborhoods where they work, and reflect that locale’s mix of Sunnis and Shiites.
“But I don’t like to talk in these terms,” Rahim said. “We deal with each other on how well qualified we are and how we’re supporting the mission.”
Asked how many of his peers think this way, Rahim at first ducked the question. “As officers, they’re not supposed to have any connections with the militia,” he said, before adding, when pressed, “Maybe 75 percent of IP officers think the way I do, and 25 percent have some loyalty to somebody else.
“The most important thing is to make the IPs trust themselves, and to make the people trust the IPs,” Rahim said. “We lost this trust before, because some IPs joined the militias.”
But the police transition teams seem powerless to track sectarian influence among the IPs, much less do anything about it.
For one thing, the MPs don’t track the sectarian breakdown of the IP forces with which they work, Sama said.
“We have to believe that this station, whether it’s Sunni or Shi’a, is here to support the Iraqi people,” he said.
And short of witnessing an IP attacking coalition forces, they also have no way to know whether an IP is working with the enemy, MP officers said.
But they do know one thing: Despite Rahim’s view that a quarter of IP officers are loyal to parties other than the Iraqi government, “none of our [IP] guys have been fired, punished or put in jail” for any sectarian-linked crimes, Sama said.
Too few police
Joe Santos, the principal international police adviser for the Mansour district, said the district police force’s biggest challenge is retention. However, again, Sama said he had no figures to back that up.
“We don’t track the turnover piece of it,” he said. “I don’t have any accurate numbers for the turnover rate for the IPs.”
But other numbers indicate the Iraqi police in this part of western Baghdad are undermanned. The Mansour and Abu Ghraib districts together are authorized about 2,200 IPs but have only about 1,800, according to Sama.
Only 900 to 1,200 are on hand at any given time, he said, because IPs are allowed a day off for every day they work.
The lack of reliable data hampers even the basic task of tracking crime rates by district. The Iraqi army, which until recently had military control of the areas in which Williams’ PTTs operate, didn’t keep reliable records of violent incidents, so there are no data to “really measure crime rates or attacks rising and falling,” she said.
However, Galloucis said it is the job of the Iraqis, not his MPs, to consolidate this sort of data, and that was happening, but at echelons above the station level.
What is clear is that for some IPs, fighting crime takes a back seat to staying alive. An April 28 visit to the Khadra station by Romero, his squad and two Military Times journalists showed how far some IPs have yet to travel before they can play an effective role in securing their communities.
The station chief was away, leaving Qussim, the shift supervisor, in charge. When talk turned to manning issues, it became clear that those in charge at every level — PTT chief, shift supervisor, station chief and district chief — used different sets of numbers to evaluate the station’s personnel levels. The previous day, Rahim, the district chief, said 135 police were on the books at Khadra. But Romero said 100 were assigned to the station.
However many there were, Qussim said 95 percent were Shiite, even though Khadra is an overwhelmingly Sunni neighborhood. Rahim had said the previous day that the Khadra police were virtually all Sunnis.
However, Qussim said, to survive in the neighborhood, the Shiite IPs will say they’re Sunni.
Qussim’s boss, the station chief, had told Romero that 30 police were assigned to Qussim’s shift, but papers Romero held in his hand said the shift had 20 men. Qussim said there were 35 police on his shift but that only 18 were on duty that afternoon. Five were on leave, and none of the 11 police on his shift who live outside the area had shown up for work.
U.S. and Iraqi officers stressed that the station was atypical. Rahim said it has the highest turnover in his district, with more than 50 policemen quitting over the previous seven months “because of the threats and assassinations.”
Romero decided to visit two checkpoints on the road leading to the police station. Qussim had assured him he had three IPs at each checkpoint alongside the Iraqi National Police. Romero stepped outside and encountered the lone policeman at the guard post at the station parking lot entrance. When Romero asked him why he was wearing neither body armor nor a helmet, the IP said the temperature of about 75 or 80 degrees was “too hot” for the life-saving gear.
The MP sergeant moved on to the first checkpoint, about 100 meters down the road, where he found only the National Police. Within a few minutes, a pickup truck raced out of the station carrying the three missing IPs. When they got out, none was wearing body armor or helmets.
Asked why they had left their posts, they explained that they had all headed back to the station to replace a battery in their single hand-held radio.
The scenario was almost repeated at the next checkpoint, but this time the three IPs, two of whom were wearing body armor and helmets, made it back to the checkpoint just ahead of Romero.
They also used the “just going back to the station to get a radio battery” excuse. The pickup trucks the IPs used to race to the checkpoints were two of only four vehicles — out of 18 assigned to the station — that were operational, Romero said.
An improving picture
But the IPs’ prospects are improving, and, therefore, so is their impact on the war, U.S. and Iraqi officers said.
U.S. officials are working to ensure that the IPs receive “somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple of hundred” armored vehicles soon, Galloucis said.
The Joint Security Stations established throughout Baghdad as part of the new security plan for the city, bringing together Iraqi army, police, National Police and U.S. Army elements, are helping to bridge what had been a divide between the IPs and other Iraqi security forces, U.S. officers said.
Perhaps most significantly, the plan to push the IPs onto the streets in the expectation that this would lead to information about enemy forces appears to be paying off, U.S. and Iraqi officers said.
“We are starting to get a lot of anecdotal evidence that the people are looking at the police in a more positive way,” Galloucis said. “In the last 60 to 90 days, we have seen more instances where, because of tips given to the Iraqi police, we — coalition and Iraqi forces — have been able to discover significant [weapons] caches.”
Maj. Sallam Maryosh Jazaa, 36, chief of the Ghazaliyah police station, said the coalition is, in fact, now winning the war.
“The militias have control of a few pieces of the city, but the government and the allies control most of it,” he said.
Ellie
U.S. troops guide Iraqi police as they hit the streets
By Sean D. Naylor - snaylor@militarytimes.com
Posted : June 11, 2007
BAGHDAD — Maj. Qussim was scared, too scared to give his full name to a reporter.
As the police officer shifted uneasily in the vinyl chair behind his desk, his fear was palpable but not irrational. His boss, the chief of the Khadra police station in western Baghdad, a Sunni officer like himself, had been killed the previous week, joining three other Sunni officers from the station who had fallen in the line of duty since the demise of Saddam Hussein.
“Al-Qaida controls this area,” said Qussim, a shift supervisor. “It’s so dangerous.”
As with local law enforcement assets in any counterinsurgency, Iraqi policemen such as Qussim should be playing a critical role in the fight against al-Qaida in Iraq, homegrown Sunni insurgent groups and Shiite militias. By providing a presence on streets where they were raised, police officers can identify someone who seems out of place earlier than can troops from out of town, while acting as a trusted conduit through which locals can pass along information.
That, at least, is the theory. But the Iraqi police — “IPs” — have been hobbled by a tarnished history, perceptions of sectarian bias and an almost total lack of preparedness.
And they are paying a heavy price. Last year, attacks killed more than 600 Iraqi police and wounded another 1,400, said Col. Mike Galloucis, commander of the 89th Military Police Brigade. The equivalent figures for this year are on track to equal or exceed that toll, he added.
With speculation among U.S. officers here rife that American troop strength in Baghdad will fall dramatically over the next two years, leaving Iraqi security forces on their own, Galloucis’ troops are at the forefront of a desperate effort to give the IPs a fighting chance.
The Iraqi police force has an 86-year history, but it has not always been a proud one. Under Saddam, the force had a reputation for corruption and was considered the least prestigious of Iraq’s security forces.
Now, the U.S., with Galloucis’ MPs in the lead, is trying to turn it into a community police force, using squad-sized police transition teams to work with IPs. Galloucis has carved about 200 police transition teams out of his force.
“A company will provide up to nine PTTs,” said Capt. Jason Sama, commander of the brigade’s 410th Military Police Company.
Since December, his nine teams have covered the 12 IP stations in west Baghdad’s Mansour and Abu Ghraib districts, which in turn are responsible for policing a population he estimated at between 200,000 and 300,000.
Ten international police advisers under a different chain of command assist Sama’s company in training the IPs. While the advisers focus on liaising with the station chief and giving hands-on and classroom instruction, the MPs concentrate on leader development, logistics and force protection, while also helping with training that focuses as much on “survival skills for the street,” such as weapons handling and tactical movement, as it does on basic police skills, said 1st Lt. Megan Williams, Sama’s 2nd Platoon leader.
The IP force the 89th’s MPs encountered was organized into “local” or “station” police who acted like firefighters, waiting in their station for trouble to be reported; “patrol police” (as U.S. troops call them) who walked or drove the beat; traffic police; a highway patrol force; and a criminal investigation division made up of detectives.
A separate organization, the Iraqi National Police, is a paramilitary force created by the Iraqi government under the Ministry of the Interior as a counterweight to the Iraqi army.
Because most IPs are station police, U.S. troops placed great emphasis on ridding them of their reactive mind-set and getting them out on the streets — which came as a rude shock for many.
“For them, it’s a new thing to go out and patrol,” said Staff Sgt. Eddie Romero, 2nd Squad leader in Sama’s 1st Platoon and the police transition team leader for the Khadra IP station.
But when the IPs head out onto the streets, they do so in police cars and soft-skinned Chevrolet pickup trucks that are vulnerable to small-arms fire, let alone the powerful improvised explosive devices that can destroy much more heavily armored vehicles.
“The biggest equipment shortcoming they have is the lack of hardened vehicles,” Galloucis said. “They would benefit enormously from having a hardened vehicle.”
Other MPs agreed. “The threat that’s outside these gates is not made for a civilian car,” said Romero, who was wounded four days later in an incident that killed another MP and an interpreter.
But the Iraqis don’t do a good job of maintaining the equipment they get, Romero said. “Since we gave control back to the Iraqis, it’s been very difficult; ... a lot of their supply systems are broken and corrupt,” he said.
‘We can’t shadow them’
The PTTs are similar in many respects to the military transition teams that assist the Iraqi army, but there are key differences. Although each MTT is led by a field-grade officer one rank below the commander of the Iraqi unit to which the MTT is attached, most PTTs are led by noncommissioned officers who do not have the same prestige in the Iraqi security forces that they enjoy in the U.S. Army.
The reason for this is simple, Galloucis said: There just aren’t enough MPs to go around. “If you look at the number of MP requirements worldwide, and the number of MP units [available] to meet those requirements, there’s always a delta,” he said.
Although the military transition teams often play a strong role in guiding the actions of their Iraqi counterparts, Sama said he sees the role of PTT members as being that of “enablers.”
“We enable them to be able to maybe look at systems in a different way,” he said. “The intent behind these transition teams was to allow these guys to take the lead.”
“We’re there as advisers,” Williams said. “We can’t shadow them, because we want them to do their jobs — we don’t want to inhibit them. My district commander [is a full colonel who] has been an IP for 23 years. He’s ... going to look at me and say, ‘This is a 23-year-old female lieutenant from the United States. What is she going to tell me that I haven’t seen or done?’ “
But changing the bureaucratic culture here is essential if the Iraqi police’s potential is to be realized, said Galloucis, who liaises daily with the Iraqi police force’s most senior generals.
“Far too many things in this country are still too centrally controlled,” he said, with decisions that should be made at the station level still being referred “to the highest levels. ... [N]o one takes responsibility.”
For the Iraqi police’s chain of command, the “highest levels” are in the Shiite-dominated Ministry of Interior, where officials are apparently keen to exercise direct control of their police.
“Every one of my [five] stations has changed commanders more than once” since December, Williams said.
Part of the problem, the IPs told her, was that the Interior Ministry ordered “a blanket firing” of all IP officers of a certain rank who had been members of the Sunni-dominated Ba’ath Party under Saddam.
The ministry has its “own system of doing business,” Sama said. “We don’t see the reasons behind the movement of a commander.”
But despite the ministry’s machinations, police chiefs are quick to rebut allegations of sectarian bias, or suggestions that some police are loyal to Shiite militias such as Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.
Col. Rahim Jabar Fahad, 42, police chief of the Mansour district, said there is little sectarian tension between his police and the communities they serve because most police are from the neighborhoods where they work, and reflect that locale’s mix of Sunnis and Shiites.
“But I don’t like to talk in these terms,” Rahim said. “We deal with each other on how well qualified we are and how we’re supporting the mission.”
Asked how many of his peers think this way, Rahim at first ducked the question. “As officers, they’re not supposed to have any connections with the militia,” he said, before adding, when pressed, “Maybe 75 percent of IP officers think the way I do, and 25 percent have some loyalty to somebody else.
“The most important thing is to make the IPs trust themselves, and to make the people trust the IPs,” Rahim said. “We lost this trust before, because some IPs joined the militias.”
But the police transition teams seem powerless to track sectarian influence among the IPs, much less do anything about it.
For one thing, the MPs don’t track the sectarian breakdown of the IP forces with which they work, Sama said.
“We have to believe that this station, whether it’s Sunni or Shi’a, is here to support the Iraqi people,” he said.
And short of witnessing an IP attacking coalition forces, they also have no way to know whether an IP is working with the enemy, MP officers said.
But they do know one thing: Despite Rahim’s view that a quarter of IP officers are loyal to parties other than the Iraqi government, “none of our [IP] guys have been fired, punished or put in jail” for any sectarian-linked crimes, Sama said.
Too few police
Joe Santos, the principal international police adviser for the Mansour district, said the district police force’s biggest challenge is retention. However, again, Sama said he had no figures to back that up.
“We don’t track the turnover piece of it,” he said. “I don’t have any accurate numbers for the turnover rate for the IPs.”
But other numbers indicate the Iraqi police in this part of western Baghdad are undermanned. The Mansour and Abu Ghraib districts together are authorized about 2,200 IPs but have only about 1,800, according to Sama.
Only 900 to 1,200 are on hand at any given time, he said, because IPs are allowed a day off for every day they work.
The lack of reliable data hampers even the basic task of tracking crime rates by district. The Iraqi army, which until recently had military control of the areas in which Williams’ PTTs operate, didn’t keep reliable records of violent incidents, so there are no data to “really measure crime rates or attacks rising and falling,” she said.
However, Galloucis said it is the job of the Iraqis, not his MPs, to consolidate this sort of data, and that was happening, but at echelons above the station level.
What is clear is that for some IPs, fighting crime takes a back seat to staying alive. An April 28 visit to the Khadra station by Romero, his squad and two Military Times journalists showed how far some IPs have yet to travel before they can play an effective role in securing their communities.
The station chief was away, leaving Qussim, the shift supervisor, in charge. When talk turned to manning issues, it became clear that those in charge at every level — PTT chief, shift supervisor, station chief and district chief — used different sets of numbers to evaluate the station’s personnel levels. The previous day, Rahim, the district chief, said 135 police were on the books at Khadra. But Romero said 100 were assigned to the station.
However many there were, Qussim said 95 percent were Shiite, even though Khadra is an overwhelmingly Sunni neighborhood. Rahim had said the previous day that the Khadra police were virtually all Sunnis.
However, Qussim said, to survive in the neighborhood, the Shiite IPs will say they’re Sunni.
Qussim’s boss, the station chief, had told Romero that 30 police were assigned to Qussim’s shift, but papers Romero held in his hand said the shift had 20 men. Qussim said there were 35 police on his shift but that only 18 were on duty that afternoon. Five were on leave, and none of the 11 police on his shift who live outside the area had shown up for work.
U.S. and Iraqi officers stressed that the station was atypical. Rahim said it has the highest turnover in his district, with more than 50 policemen quitting over the previous seven months “because of the threats and assassinations.”
Romero decided to visit two checkpoints on the road leading to the police station. Qussim had assured him he had three IPs at each checkpoint alongside the Iraqi National Police. Romero stepped outside and encountered the lone policeman at the guard post at the station parking lot entrance. When Romero asked him why he was wearing neither body armor nor a helmet, the IP said the temperature of about 75 or 80 degrees was “too hot” for the life-saving gear.
The MP sergeant moved on to the first checkpoint, about 100 meters down the road, where he found only the National Police. Within a few minutes, a pickup truck raced out of the station carrying the three missing IPs. When they got out, none was wearing body armor or helmets.
Asked why they had left their posts, they explained that they had all headed back to the station to replace a battery in their single hand-held radio.
The scenario was almost repeated at the next checkpoint, but this time the three IPs, two of whom were wearing body armor and helmets, made it back to the checkpoint just ahead of Romero.
They also used the “just going back to the station to get a radio battery” excuse. The pickup trucks the IPs used to race to the checkpoints were two of only four vehicles — out of 18 assigned to the station — that were operational, Romero said.
An improving picture
But the IPs’ prospects are improving, and, therefore, so is their impact on the war, U.S. and Iraqi officers said.
U.S. officials are working to ensure that the IPs receive “somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple of hundred” armored vehicles soon, Galloucis said.
The Joint Security Stations established throughout Baghdad as part of the new security plan for the city, bringing together Iraqi army, police, National Police and U.S. Army elements, are helping to bridge what had been a divide between the IPs and other Iraqi security forces, U.S. officers said.
Perhaps most significantly, the plan to push the IPs onto the streets in the expectation that this would lead to information about enemy forces appears to be paying off, U.S. and Iraqi officers said.
“We are starting to get a lot of anecdotal evidence that the people are looking at the police in a more positive way,” Galloucis said. “In the last 60 to 90 days, we have seen more instances where, because of tips given to the Iraqi police, we — coalition and Iraqi forces — have been able to discover significant [weapons] caches.”
Maj. Sallam Maryosh Jazaa, 36, chief of the Ghazaliyah police station, said the coalition is, in fact, now winning the war.
“The militias have control of a few pieces of the city, but the government and the allies control most of it,” he said.
Ellie