Efforts intensify to train Iraqi police

But for many Iraqis, seeing police in the streets of Baghdad continues to provide little comfort.

"The police are just a bunch of gangs rolling around in pickup trucks waving Kalashnikovs," says Subhi Nazem Tawfiq, an ex-Iraqi general and the author of 14 books on Arab politics, history, and militaries. After the fall of Saddam Hussein he worked with US officials to reestablish the Ministry of Defense. "These are people charged up with militant Shiism," he says of many within the police ranks. "They hate Fallujah people, they hate people from Mosul, they hate Sunni [Arabs]."

Inside her dimly lit home in a mixed Sunni Arab-Shiite neighborhood of New Baghdad, a Sunni Arab mother huddles on the floor, weeping as she tells how police dragged her 23-year-old son from his bed at 1:30 a.m. last June.

She searched for him for six months. Finally, 10 days ago she found his picture with a police report at a Baghdad morgue. The report was dated June 17, the day of the arrest. It said simply that an unidentified body had been found strangled, wrists bound, in a roadside ditch not far from her home.

"I cannot look at [the police]," she says, choking on her anger. "The hate inside these policemen, this is what made them kill my son."

As leading Shiites rattle their sabers in response to last week's death toll (it was one of the country's deadliest weeks), Sunni Arab leaders fear retaliation by police. They have already begun to take a stand against police dragnets and alleged excesses. The Sunni Arab fundamentalist Iraqi Islamic Party says they have put together armed groups to protect neighborhoods targeted by Iraqi police.

"It's a necessary response to the massacres that have occurred in a number of neighborhoods," says Amr al-Jaboori, a member of the party's human rights committee. "The police should protect citizens, not terrorize them."

While the US is giving Iraqi police a greater role in putting down the insurgency, doing so may be counterproductive to American goals if the police continue to be viewed as simply a glorified Shiite militia.

The US says it's dealing with that issue by recruiting more Sunni Arabs, Turkomen, and Kurds to the police. It also plans to increase the emphasis on human rights in the 10-week police academy and partner US battalions with police special forces units.

"These recruits get 32 hours of human rights and rule-of-law training," Major General Peterson tells the concerned congressmen. "I've been serving for 34 years, and I don't have 32 hours of human rights training."

He points to one of his Iraqi protégés, Colonel Nomaan, the Iraqi commander of the police force's Emergency Response Unit. "This unit is representative of the Iraqi population."

But Nomaan admits that for now, at least, his unit is an exception. "I insisted on this unit being ethnically balanced, but other leaders aren't like me," he says. "It won't get better as long as we keep distributing ministerial posts based on sect, and not on competency."

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