A rchive Date
[ 11-01-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Iraq ]
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[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6810092/
Iraqi security forces are hunters, hunted
Intimidation campaign difficult to fight
By Karl Vick
Updated: 11:32 p.m. ET Jan. 10, 2005
BAGHDAD, Jan. 10 - The masked men in the streets of Iraq's capital see themselves as the good guys. Manning checkpoints and darting through traffic on foot, Iraqi policemen, soldiers and National Guardsmen assume a distinctly defensive posture: rifles up, ski masks down.
"It's part of the uniform," said Ahmed, a first lieutenant with a black woolen balaclava tugged down to the collar of his camouflage jacket. Both jacket and mask are now standard issue for the security forces of Iraq's interim government, newly trained troops who do double duty as hunter and hunted.
Ahmed and four fellow police commandos said they would not go on duty without their ski masks, give out their full names for publication or tell their neighbors what they really do for a living.
"I say I work installing ceramic tiles," said Wisam, 20, who commutes from south Baghdad.
"I say I'm a car mechanic," said Abu Jaffar, after emerging from a hiding place behind a pickup truck mounted with a machine gun. Even in his mask, he had sought cover after spotting a neighbor getting off a bus 30 feet away.
Intimidation has become the major tool for insurgents trying to thwart the Iraqi government, which is trying to mount nationwide parliamentary elections while establishing a homegrown security force that will give voters a fighting chance of reaching the polls.
Hundreds of Iraqis have been killed in recent weeks, and the fear that insurgents say they aim to instill in Iraq's population of 25 million spreads with every assassination and every leaflet that threatens death for anyone participating in the elections.
Baghdad's deputy police chief and his son were gunned down outside their home Monday, while several National Guardsmen in Baiji, an insurgent hot spot about 125 miles north of Baghdad, said 142 guardsmen had resigned there.
A day earlier, three bodies were found outside the north-central city of Samarra. All were young men with their hands bound behind their backs and multiple gunshot wounds to the face. At least one was a Baghdad police officer. A city council member in Riyadh, in the Sunni Triangle, was thrown into the trunk of a car by armed men.
"We applied for this job to protect our people, even though I was threatened four times by what is called Ansar al-Sunna Army," said Hisham Sattar Jabbar, a police commando, as he tended to wounded colleagues at the site of a massive truck bombing that killed at least 10 people on Jan. 4.
"They say we work for the Americans," Jabbar said. "But we work with the people and for the people."
Support for police strong
Public sentiment appears to bolster the sentiment. Opinion surveys show Iraqis support the new security services nearly as strongly as they support the country's religious leadership, a group that receives higher approval than any other institution.
Support is particularly high for police, whose officers are recruited from the towns they serve.
To the discomfort of U.S. officials, however, who tend to be mistrustful of local police units, that also means they often serve as a barometer of public acceptance of the insurgency.
In Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, the 5,000-member police force disintegrated on Nov. 10 when waves of guerrillas assaulted police stations to open a new front away from a U.S. offensive underway in Fallujah. Two months later, the northern city remains without a local police force.
At about the same time, the police force in Ramadi, 30 miles west of Fallujah, also deserted en masse. About a month later, almost half its 1,600 officers were back on the job, officers said.
"They found the support of the people," said Col. Muhanned Nouri. "Before, when we patrolled, people didn't care about us. Now, people support us, give us tea or water."
As unpopular as the American presence may be, with a large majority of Iraqis saying they want U.S. troops to leave, according to public opinion polls, the insurgents are wearing out their welcome as well.
Residents of Ramadi -- having seen Fallujah almost completely destroyed by a U.S. offensive to retake the city from insurgents -- have voiced a sharpened appetite for order. They said they upbraided guerrillas for using residential neighborhoods to stage attacks against U.S. troops and putting families at risk from crossfire.
'Sick of the armed people'
"We want security and order back in the city. We are sick of the armed people," said Talib Ashour, who had come to a Ramadi police station to file a complaint about a property dispute. The problem normally would be settled through informal tribal negotiations, but Ashour wanted to make a point.
"We should follow the law, because this is our fate," he said. "Those armed men are not permanent. They will live maybe a month or two, maybe less than that."
For now, however, a good number of them remain alive, as the commander reminded a handful of spirited young officers during a visit by an Iraqi journalist. The recruits had painted over insurgent graffiti on a station wall with defiant slogans of their own, such as "Our life is long, yours is short." But when they offered to pose for a photograph, their commander stepped in.
"Don't put yourself at risk," Nouri advised. "If those photos are published, you will be killed one after the other."
The threat against Iraqi security forces is highest in the Sunni Muslim heartland, where the insurgency has grown as the political fortunes of its residents have diminished since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
In the northern and western portions of central Iraq, the pressure against voting or taking any action that might lend credibility to the interim government and its American sponsors is intense, though seldom articulated.
When pollsters for the U.S.-funded International Republican Institute, which is helping Iraqis prepare for elections, asked Sunni Muslims why they were not planning to vote, 74 percent gave "no answer."
"My husband received many threats, sometimes by letters, sometimes by armed man who entered the house by force," said Mona Mosa, a resident of Baiji. Last week, police brought the headless body of her husband to their house.
Hasballah Shati, 50, a former fighter pilot, defied the threats and continued working as a translator at an American base. He was smoking a water pipe in front of his house when three armed men took him away. His best friend, Zamil Hussein, remembered that one of the kidnappers wore white training shoes, because they were stained by mascara when Shati's wife threw herself at his feet, begging for her husband's life.
"The intimidation campaign is extraordinarily hard," a senior U.S. Embassy official said. "It's very hard to combat."
The counter-strategy being applied by U.S. and Iraqi forces, according to another Western diplomat, has been grounded in weeks of relentless raids aimed at underground insurgent networks.
Infiltration a problem
"We're doing an awful lot of things to strip away the secondary supporters the intimidators have to have around," the diplomat said.
At the same time, insurgents have worked to infiltrate the Iraqi security services. U.S. and Iraqi commanders openly acknowledge that the ranks of the new army and police are routinely compromised by insurgents.
The same subterfuge threatens Iraq's civilian government: In October, a senior official in the office of the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, was arrested on suspicion of providing insurgents with home addresses and other personal details of government employees being targeted for assassination.
But the security forces, uniformed and out on the street, remain the most vulnerable.
"Some of it is just because they're easier to kill," said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But some of it is because the insurgents worry about these forces establishing themselves."
"They're becoming a very capable force," said Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, "which is exactly what the enemy is afraid of."
That's also how the police commandos see it, through the eyeholes of their ski masks.
"We are the first step on the long road to security," said Abu Jaffar. "If people see us working, they'll have the courage to go in the army themselves."
And if they cover their faces, it's only to level the playing field against an invisible enemy that attacks through drive-by shootings and suicide car bombs.
"The terrorists are the cowards," Abu Jaffar said, "because they don't face us."
Special correspondents Salih Saif Aldin in Baiji and Bassam Sebti in Baghdad contributed to this report. © 2005 The Washington Post Company
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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