[NYTr] Plans for Iraqi Recruits Remain "Stalled"

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Washingtonn Post - Nov 12, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/11/AR2007111101730.html?nav=rss_world

Hurdles Stall Plan For Iraqi Recruits

Shiite Leadership Wary of Bringing Fighters Into Ranks

By Joshua Partlow and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers

BAGHDAD -- The U.S. effort to organize nearly 70,000 local fighters to
solidify security gains in Iraq is facing severe political and
logistical challenges as U.S.-led forces struggle to manage the
recruits and the central government resists incorporating them into the
Iraqi police and army, according to senior military officials.

Gen. David H. Petraeus and other top commanders have hailed the
initiative to enlist Iraqi tribes and former insurgents in the battle
against extremist groups, but leaders of Iraq's Shiite-dominated
government have feared that the local fighters known as "volunteers" --
more than 80 percent of whom are Sunni -- could eventually mount an
armed opposition, Iraqi and U.S. officials said.

In some cases, the government has confined the fighters to their
headquarters or local mosques. Nevertheless, the volunteers pour in by
the hundreds every week, forming a massive but cumbersome force lacking
common guidelines, status, pay or uniforms. The effort represents an
opportunity to shore up local police and eventually relieve U.S.
troops, but one that could prove fleeting or backfire if the volunteers
are not organized quickly, officials said.

"To give you a sense of the bureaucratic challenge here, the entire
British army is just under 100,000," said Maj. Gen. Paul Newton, the
British counterinsurgency expert tapped by Petraeus to lead the effort.
"What we've seen in this campaign is already therefore three-quarters
of the size of the British army, without any kind of human resource
management structure to recruit it, train it, vet it," Newton, 51, said
in an interview.

Since taking the job in early June, Newton has met with tribal sheiks,
Sunni insurgents, Shiite militia leaders and Iraqi politicians in an
attempt to "glue together" the local armed groups with the Iraqi
government. But as the local initiatives proliferate, Newton said, the
effort is like "trying to sprint while putting your socks on."

More than 67,000 people across 12 of Iraq's 18 provinces are registered
under the military designation Concerned Local Citizens, and 51,000 of
those have been screened and had their names, fingerprints and other
biometric data recorded by the U.S. military, Newton said. Such
information is entered into a vast database that soldiers can use to
help identify past criminal behavior, such as by matching fingerprints
on a roadside bomb component. Eighty-two percent of the volunteers are
Sunni and 18 percent are Shiite, he said. About 37,000 are being paid
about $300 a month through contracts funded by the U.S.-led military
coalition.

Although U.S. commanders stress that the coalition is not forming a
Sunni militia, Iraqi leaders complain that paying the fighters is
tantamount to arming them. The Iraqi government so far has balked at
permanently hiring large numbers of the volunteers, resisting pressure
from U.S. commanders to lift caps on the number of police in Anbar and
Diyala provinces. Only about 1,600 of the volunteers have been trained
and sworn in to the Iraqi security forces, primarily with the police.

"It's admittedly slow progress," said Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a
military spokesman in Baghdad, who said the goal now is to have 17,000
hired as police officers.

Last month, the Shiite political alliance of Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki called on the U.S. military to halt its recruitment of
Sunnis. Referring to Sunni fighters, Iraqi national security adviser
Mowaffak al-Rubaie told Washington Post reporters, "The more they
depend on the coalition, it is seen as undermining the Iraqi
government."

Iraqi officials are concerned about the past behavior of many of the
men now working with the Americans, citing problems arising from the
infiltration of the police by Shiite militias. "We ended up with a
police force that is not loyal to the government and to the country,"
said Sami al-Askiri, a Shiite legislator and Maliki adviser. "If we
copy this and do it with Sunnis, we will just create another problem."

"We have to take the Sunnis inside the police and the army. They are
part of the Iraqi society, but we have to check them, we have to check
all their backgrounds," Askiri said. "If we do this the wrong way, we
will end up with another militia inside the police force, but a Sunni
one, not a Shiite one."

In Sadiyah, a southwestern Baghdad neighborhood where fighting between
militias and insurgents has forced thousands of families to leave, the
Iraqi government's wariness about the U.S. partnership with Sunni
residents prompted a public condemnation: an Oct. 2 statement by the
ruling Shiite coalition saying that the residents were involved in
"kidnapping, killing and extortion."

Many expected the initiative would be more difficult to implement in
Baghdad, where Sunnis and Shiites live in closer proximity than in
Anbar, a predominantly Sunni province where volunteer forces had proved
successful. Instead of fighting just the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda
in Iraq, the volunteers in Baghdad are facing Shiite militias, other
Sunni insurgents and at times corrupt Iraqi security forces.

"Sadiyah, in particular, we've got to be very careful, frankly,"
Petraeus said. "That's a case of absolutely making sure that the
concerned local citizens do not become agents of sectarian violence."

U.S. soldiers in Sadiyah said that soon after the recruits stood up as
an organized force on Sept. 12, violence dropped and intelligence about
militant activity improved. Shuttered shops along the main commercial
street began slowly to open -- 10, 50, then more than 100, soldiers
said.

The Iraqi government's accusations of criminal behavior by the
volunteers are exaggerated, said Lt. Col. George A. Glaze, the
battalion commander in Sadiyah. "There are people skewing this equation
in a way that is not helpful," he said.

Some of Glaze's soldiers saw their new partners, whom they call the
Iraqi Security Volunteers or ISV, as irking the government. This was
because of their work against the Mahdi Army, a powerful Shiite militia
known in Arabic as Jaish al-Mahdi or JAM, that had collaborated with
the Iraqi National Police earlier in the year. "The reality is, in my
guess, that the ISV was interfering too much in JAM's operations," said
Lt. Brian Bifulco, 23, a platoon leader. "And a directive came down
from the prime minister."

Sadiyah residents say the local volunteers maintain divided loyalties.
Ali Abdel Hussein al-Asadi, 41, an employee with Iraq's Commission on
Public Integrity, said his father, a Shiite, was kidnapped from his
Sadiyah home in July by men who claimed to be from the Islamic Army, a
Sunni insurgent group. Some of them later joined the neighborhood's
Baghdad Brigade, a local force of a few hundred men. Residents call
these men "Sahawa," or the Awakening, after the Awakening Council of
Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar. Asadi said his father had to tell his
kidnappers he was a Sunni to avoid execution.

Asadi's parents fled the neighborhood on the day the Baghdad Brigade
began its official duties. "Two days later, we heard from a friend that
some people who live in my district broke into the house at night,
stole what we had left and were protected by the Sahawa forces," he
said. "Before they left they set the house on fire."

"The big problem is that the Americans are backing them -- no one can
talk about them," Asadi said. "And if you tell the Americans about
them, they will not believe you."

Maj. Khudair Abbas Hassan, police chief in the nearby al-Amil
neighborhood, was also critical of the volunteers. "If you are a
displaced family and you return, you would find the same people who
drove you out of your home in the first place," he said, "but now they
have legitimate titles and are carrying weapons."

On Oct. 1, Maliki ordered the Baghdad Brigade off the streets of
Sadiyah, according to U.S. soldiers, and confined to its headquarters
and mosques.

"The government has frozen us," said Assad Jadou, a 34-year-old
electrician and volunteer. "We as the Baghdad Brigade, unlike other
volunteers, are not able to confront and fight al-Qaeda and drive them
out of our neighborhoods. . . . Now our position is weak."

Newton, a veteran of two tours in Iraq and eight as a commander in
Northern Ireland, said he understands that for U.S. troops and Iraq's
Shiite leaders it can be agonizing to deal with former Sunni
insurgents. "The British army has had to go through some of the painful
and rather distasteful things that you have to do in order to reach
accommodations with people who until very recently were actually
killing your soldiers," he said.

U.S. forces also hold some reservations about the volunteer forces. In
a meeting with the Baghdad Brigade, American soldiers expressed concern
that brigade members were partly responsible for a recent spike in
violence in an attempt to encourage the central government to allow
them back on the street. "If it continues, it's going to have the
opposite effect," Maj. Eric Timmerman, operations officer for the
battalion in Sadiyah, told the leader of the group, Brig. Gen. Mohammed
Hassan.

"When they started out, they appeared pretty legitimate, I think,"
Bifulco said. "There is collaboration now going on, at least on a small
level," between al-Qaeda in Iraq and the volunteers.

Jadou, of the brigade, agreed that some of members work with al-Qaeda
in Iraq. "All of the factions, even al-Qaeda, have intelligence
elements over here, who will see how the brigade is going to work, and
whether it would be for the benefit of the Sunnis," he said.

Nevertheless, U.S. military officials argue that the benefits of the
program far outweigh the risks. Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the No. 2
U.S. commander in Iraq, said that over a recent 15-day period,
volunteers had provided tips that allowed the recovery of a
"staggering" amount of munitions: 37,000 pounds of explosives, 2,000
artillery rounds, 500 rockets, nearly 500 armor-piercing projectiles
and components, and hundreds of rifles, grenades and suicide vests.

In Diyala alone, the U.S. military is working with 4,000 men, some of
them former Sunni insurgents, who have discovered several hundred
weapons caches and nearly 100 houses rigged with bombs, and helped
bring about a decrease in attacks in what had been some of the
deadliest territory in Iraq, said Col. David W. Sutherland, the U.S.
commander in the province. But his goal to formalize these men into the
police force has stalled as he has negotiated with officials in Baghdad.

"I'm frustrated with the Ministry of Interior," Sutherland said of the
government agency that oversees the police force. "They're slow
rolling, by trying to control things in Baghdad."

Under the latest plan, the Iraqi government would hire a limited number
of the volunteers as police officers or soldiers and assume the
temporary contracts for the rest, who would work as guards at fixed
locations or in reconstruction work. "Then after six months or a year
we will give them a stipend, recruit them somewhere else or send them
for occupational training. I don't know, let's cross that bridge when
we come to it," said Rubaie, the national security adviser.

For now, Jadou said Baghdad Brigade members train inside their
headquarters, relying on donations for funding and weapons. Their
commander, Hassan, pressed Timmerman in the meeting about when the
Iraqi government would allow them back on the streets.

"I don't know when that's going to be," Timmerman replied. "I don't
make that decision."

Tyson reported from the Pentagon.