In charge, Iraqis crack down hard

The announcement Wednesday of a new national security law is the most dramatic in a string of recent moves by Iraqi officials, both local and national, to get tough on crime and insurgents. It illustrates the new interim government's priorities - and underscores the use of hard-line practices often avoided by US soldiers and the now-defunct US-run Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).

In Baghdad, for example, the police and interior ministry are now conducting large-scale sweeps throughout the city to capture alleged criminals; in the Shiite shrine city of Najaf, local officials have imposed a 7 p.m. evening curfew to deal with insurgents; local judges have reinstated the death penalty that the US occupation had suspended; and the Interior Ministry says it will soon begin removing tens of thousands of squatters from government buildings.

Iraqi public opinion is broadly supportive of almost any measure that could bring the situation in Iraq under control. "The US never did anything to stop the gangs,'' says Mohammed Hassan, a fruit vendor in Baghdad's tough Bettawain neighborhood, where Iraqi forces arrested over 150 alleged criminals last week. "I'll support [Prime Minister Iyad] Allawi if he keeps it up."

Dealing with crime, or socially sensitive issues like squatters, was largely avoided by the US occupation, a practice dating back to the failure to control looting in the wake of the invasion. The declaration of an emergency under the new security law would allow Prime Minister Allawi to temporarily set aside many of the protections in an Iraqi Bill of Rights that CPA head Paul Bremer touted as one of the major achievements of his tenure.

"I don't distinguish between insurgents and criminals - their targets are the same, the Iraqi people," says Interior Minister Falah Hassan al-Nagib, who is in charge of Iraq's domestic policing and intelligence operations. "A priority for the Iraqi people is dealing with organized crime."

At the street level, the new government is starting to use tough tactics against criminals rarely seen since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. But most Iraqis are delighted that Allawi has vowed to reinstate the death penalty, and say the US was too soft on alleged criminals.

"Maybe people were reluctant to provide information to non-Iraqis,'' says Col. Adnan Aziz, an interior ministry spokesman. "Now we're rebuilding our security systems, which were dissolved after the invasion, and people respect us. They're helping us to make them more secure."

On June 28, the first major act of the new government was the encirclement of Bettawain and the mass arrests made there, led by Major General Hussein Ali Kamal, a Kurd who helped lead the effort against the Ansar al-Islam - an Al-Qaeda-linked terror group - in the Kurdish north before the US invasion.

General Kamal assembled a team two months before the handover to pay informants and gather intelligence on kidnap gangs and thieves in Bettawain, central Baghdad, which is populated by many immigrants from the Sudan and seen by Baghdadis as a hotbed of criminal activity.

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