Visiting congressmen stepped out of armored cars Tuesday into the mud of Camp Dublin, home to the Iraqi police's elite special forces unit. US Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, the ex-linebacker responsible for training 200,000 Iraqi police, greeted them and assured the lawmakers that his Iraqi under- studies will soon be in charge here.

"We'll have these forces trained by the end of 2006," dubbed the year of the police by US officials, "and I have full confidence that they will begin to assume control of security in Iraq," he says.

The police have become a new priority, as the US begins turning over more security control to Iraq. Scrutiny of the police intensified after the discovery of secret jails and the torture of Sunni Arab prisoners.

Shiite control of the police force is also complicating efforts to persuade Iraq's factions to put their divisions behind them and to form a government of national unity following the Dec. 15 parliamentary vote.

On Tuesday, President Bush addressed the issue in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He called on Iraqi police "not to address old grievances by taking justice into their own hands.... That's unacceptable to the United States government."

Meanwhile the insurgency rages on, singling out police on an almost daily basis. Wednesday, an attack killed two. On Monday, a pair of suicide bombers killed 29 at the Interior Ministry, and last week 70 recruits were killed in Ramadi. All told, some 3,500 Iraqi police have been killed in the past 16 months.

In the face of these attacks, US moves to reign in the Iraqi police are irking Ministry of Interior officials and leading Shiite politicians, who seem eager to step up the fight. They say they are ready to do so without US support.

"There is huge interference from the American forces with the work of the Ministry of Interior in a way that does not allow the security forces to deal with security," says Jalal al-Din Saghir, a leading Shiite preacher and member of parliament.

At the heavily guarded Interior Ministry, Mohammed Ali al-Khafaggy, the minister's deputy, says he could "put tens of thousands of police in Ramadi and Diala within hours," referring to two insurgent hot spots. "But we are not doing this because of political circumstances.... We can't defeat the terrorists unless the security forces are allowed to do what has to be done," he says.

Mr. Khafaggy's heavily secured ministry rises up from behind concrete walls and razor wire. It has an estimated 152,000 police on its payrolls, among them border guards, highway patrol, traffic cops, and special paramilitary units. With that number expected to reach 300,000, the Ministry of Interior is one of the country's most coveted posts.

But the Shiite-controlled ministry and its growing cadres of police are widely believed to be infiltrated by the Badr militia, the armed wing of the main Shiite party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Ministry officials vehemently deny this. "Where is the evidence?" Mr. Khafaggy asks.

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