Can The Iraqis Police Iraq?

By Johanna McGeary

These are the men in the middle now. Warrant Officer Kamal Aziz, a 29-year veteran of the Saddam-era police corps, spent a few weeks retraining last May, learning American-style arrest techniques and the basic art of urban warfare. "It was almost the same training as we had before," he says, standing guard outside the Yarmuk police station in west Baghdad. But now that stations like his are top targets for insurgents fighting the U.S. occupation, he says, "the challenge is bigger." A few men at his station wear borrowed U.S. body armor, but many have yet to get uniforms or the Glock pistols promised by the U.S. The bluff policeman, 46, claims the spiraling risk to men like him only "makes me stronger." But he's not sure his salary of about $100 a month--three times his former pay--is enough to justify putting his life on the line. "If I find a new job that pays better," says Aziz, "I'm going to quit."

Baha Ali Abbas, 25, was jobless before the war, so he was eager to join the Facilities Protection Service, the 20,000-man Iraqi security force hurriedly set up by the U.S. to guard such sites as embassies, ministries, banks, aid offices and oil fields. When Abbas signed on in the summer, he says, "they trained us for a week in how to shoot AKs, how to talk to people properly, how to handle yourself if someone attacks you." Two months ago, a rocket-propelled grenade flew over his head and slammed into a street near the bank he was guarding. A few weeks later, while he was inside the bank making tea, an attacker tossed a grenade over the coiled razor wire surrounding the building, shattering its windows. Abbas knows he's a prime target but says, "Since I want to live, then I must work, whether it's dangerous or not." Sergeant Kenneth Smith, one of the U.S. soldiers posted at the bank, sums up the Iraqi guards' grim situation: "You can have all the training in the world, but all you're basically doing is standing here waiting to stop the bad guys."

President Bush is counting on men like Aziz and Abbas to halt the escalating violence convulsing post-Saddam Iraq. Just as U.S. forces thought they were getting a handle on security, a series of coordinated, deadly attacks last week raised the Administration's Iraq troubles to an alarming new level. One day after rockets slammed into Baghdad's al-Rashid Hotel, where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying, the city was hit by four bombings within 45 minutes--three at police stations and one at the headquarters of the Red Cross. Thirty-four Iraqis and one American were killed, and more than 200 people were wounded. The insurgency looked bolder and more sophisticated as it advanced from simple hits to complex, orchestrated strikes.

Despite a flood of speculation by officials in the U.S. and Iraq, no one really knows who is responsible for the increasing pace and skill of the resistance, which makes it doubly hard to devise an effective defense. As polls show American popular approval for the mission in Iraq beginning to sag and as political sniping in Washington intensifies, the Bush Administration is struggling to cast dismaying events in a hopeful light. "The more progress we make on the ground," declared the President, "... the more desperate these killers become." That struck many as an Orwellian way to measure U.S. success. To keep the accent on the positive, the Coalition Provisional Authority, led by proconsul Paul Bremer, is opening a media center in Baghdad similar to the one set up in Qatar during major combat operations. "We have a story to tell," says a senior official. Part of the story last week was a fresh campaign to unearth Saddam Hussein; if it succeeds, officials hope, the resistance will dissipate.

Apart from that, Defense Department officials say the options are meager. Send in more troops? With U.S. forces already stretched globally, that's hardly possible militarily and not likely politically. Field more non-U.S. peacekeepers? Washington is trying unsuccessfully to recruit volunteers. Begin pulling out U.S. troops? Doing so anytime soon would probably destabilize Iraq entirely. That leaves little alternative but to speed up plans to train Iraqis to protect an ever growing share of the country. Even Bush critics say that's the only long-term solution. Last week, to show the Administration is not sitting idly by as the resistance grows bolder, Bremer announced a stepped-up training program.

The timetable is tight. Washington needs to get capable Iraqi security forces up and running before the insurgents score enough hits to discourage the U.S. commitment and frighten off Iraqi recruits. And Bush needs to find adequate replacements before tired G.I.s are due to rotate home next spring, smack in the middle of his re-election campaign. Yet rushing ill-trained, ill-equipped Iraqis into the breach could create new problems. Senator Joseph Biden, senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says the Administration's "stampede" to put locals in charge of pacifying Iraq "runs the risk of having the house of cards come down [if] the Iraqi people not only conclude that we can't do it but that those who are working with us are not competent."

Yet if Iraqi security forces manage to crush the insurgency using repressive measures, the Administration will be hard-pressed to say it has fulfilled its pledge to create a democratic Iraq. Already some Iraqi police complain that Americans are hindering their work by insisting on such things as due process. "If they want to see a change, they should let us operate by the old laws of the police," says Lieut. Marwan Hussein, at the Thawra police station in the heart of Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood.

Relying on untested allies also presents risks for coalition forces. It is instructive to spend a night with the 82nd Airborne's Alpha Company, 3rd Battalion, 2nd Brigade, bivouacked in southern Baghdad. An Iraqi informant reports that 12 to 20 suspected resistance leaders from Afghanistan and Syria are meeting in a mosque near the airport. The unit's commander, Captain Tyson Voelkel, tells his men these foreigners are gathering to review plans to launch terror attacks starting the next day. Some 110 G.I.s plus 40 members of the new Iraqi Civilian Defense Corps training with Alpha Company move in to seal off the area. "I hope we get some of these guys," says Voelkel. The grunts under his command are less gung-ho. "I hope no one's there," says Specialist Todd Herwood as the convoy rolls forward. "Raiding a mosque? These things just give Iraqis an excuse to get angry."

That may well have been the plan. An hour later Voelkel aborts the raid after the Iraqi informer fails to show up at a designated rendezvous and an intelligence source inside the mosque says no Afghans or Syrians are present. Instead, the mosque is filled with Ramadan worshippers and, the source suspects, a television crew waiting to film the raid. "It would have been really bad," says Voelkel, if "we were seen going in with [bomb-sniffing] dogs while 200 people were praying."

The enemy in Iraq is hidden within the population, so good intelligence is essential to combat the insurgency. Major General Raymond Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, last week said the accuracy of information the U.S. was receiving was up over the past few months from 45% to 90%. But that's not Alpha Company's experience. Its intelligence officers say the enemy has become more elusive and shadowy, especially in the dangerous Sunni triangle around Baghdad, where locals are especially reluctant to help the U.S. "Most of the stuff we go out to find turns out to be dry holes," says Private First Class Mike Sifter. "We're told there's a bomb somewhere, and all we find is one machine-gun magazine."

The Army's intelligence gathering in Iraq is bitingly criticized in a recently completed report by the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kans. According to the report, computers needed to relay time-critical information from Iraqi agents to U.S. troops were not connected, so intelligence the spies gleaned didn't generate follow-up raids by G.I.s. Most of the military-intelligence officials were junior officers with no formal training, the paper complained. What's more, the interpreters they relied on were "middle-age convenience-store workers and cab drivers" whose Arabic was only good enough "to tell the difference between a burro and a burrito."

So it was hardly surprising that a whiff of desperation hung over the Administration as it tried to assign blame for the 48 harrowing hours of bombing in Baghdad. Some officials continued to insist that most of the insurgents were Saddam loyalists. Others said the sophistication of four nearly simultaneous attacks indicated the work of foreign fighters--Islamic radicals from outside Iraq, perhaps representing al-Qaeda or the related terrorist group Ansar al-Islam. Several Administration officials told TIME that Hizballah, the Lebanese Shi'ite militia, is becoming more active in Iraq. Pentagon officials leaked word that captured insurgents had claimed that Iraqi General Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, a Saddam intimate who is No. 6 on the U.S. most-wanted list, was the main commander of Baathist hit squads. Some U.S. officials told reporters Saddam himself could be directing the attacks--though they had no hard evidence. That speculation was startling for an Administration that has long insisted, as Bush put it in July, that Saddam was "no longer a threat to the U.S., because we removed him." For months, Bush aides have dismissed criticism of the failure to capture the elusive dictator, claiming he was too busy trying to save himself to cause trouble.

A number of intelligence officials in the U.S. and Iraq who have reviewed summaries of communications intercepts and agent reports told TIME these theories--about foreign fighters, Izzat Ibrahim and Saddam--are based on supposition more than evidence. A man with a Syrian passport who tried to carry out a fifth car bombing last week was captured. Iraqis insist it is not in the psychology of their compatriots to engage in suicide attacks. But the intelligence officials say the U.S. can't really determine if there has been a significant influx of Islamists or terrorists into the country. And if foreigners are behind even some of the attacks, says an Administration official, "it makes this a much more difficult thing, if they have safe haven and resources outside Iraq." That, he adds, "makes it immaterial what you achieve inside Iraq."

No matter who is orchestrating the violence, the U.S. hopes to calm things down by rapidly turning over to Iraqis more responsibility for policing their country. State Department officials note that this has always been the ultimate exit strategy. But Bush's team has long been divided over the exact approach. Before the war, there was a contentious debate about the role of Iraqi security forces once major fighting ended. The State Department and the CIA pushed hard for a strategy that would remove only the top layers of Iraq's army and keep most of the rank-and-file intact. They argued that the army was the country's most important unifying national organization, able to transcend ethnic and religious divides.

A former deputy to Jay Garner, the first, short-lived civilian administrator in Iraq, says he thought the plan was to employ most of the soldiers in reconstruction tasks after Saddam fell. But civilians at the Pentagon and in the office of the Vice President agreed with Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the former exile opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, that full de-Baathification of the military was essential. In May, two weeks after Bremer took over as proconsul in Baghdad, he ordered the army completely demobilized. Many U.S. officials involved in post-Saddam Iraq now feel this was a poor decision, sending a vast number of experienced soldiers home, jobless and armed. For months the State Department and CIA have argued for remobilizing as fast as possible. But when lawmakers gathered in the secret S-407 briefing room on Capitol Hill last week to press the point on Bremer, he made it clear that recalling the soldiers was not on. "They made a decision to disband these guys and not use them," said a lawmaker in attendance. Reconstituting the army "would be admitting they made a mistake."

Instead, the White House is pushing the Pentagon to transform thousands of Iraqi security guards into paramilitary police officers. Capable militiamen account for only 5,000 of the 90,000 Iraqis now undertaking some sort of security work alongside U.S. forces. The Administration wants to triple the number in three months. That would require training these guards in a scant few weeks.

Bush aides think the advantage of relying more on locals is that Arabic speakers who know the people and the terrain would do a better job uncovering threats in advance than Americans. "We understand the minds of these killers," says Lieut. Colonel Salam Zajey, commander of Baghdad's al-Bayaa police station, where 15 people died in one of last week's bombings. "We lived with them for 20 years. We trained them. That should help us in fighting them."

On a visit to al-Bayaa station last week, Baghdad police chief Hassan al-Obeidi told his men, "Look, if we can get control of the streets and bring back security here, we can tell the Americans goodbye. Nobody would be happier to say it than I." And no one would be happier to hear it than the occupiers.

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington and Hassan Fattah, Romesh Ratnesar and Simon Robinson/Baghdad

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington and Hassan Fattah, Romesh Ratnesar and Simon Robinson/Baghdad