Sunnis surge beyond Baghdad
Extremists are using violence to drive a wedge further between Shiites and Sunnis, posing more challenges for the US.
from the April 2, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Americans launch new police initiative
The retaliatory killing by Shiite Iraqi police in Tal Afar after Tuesday's bombing that killed 152 people, according to the Iraqi government, underscores the uphill battle faced by the US in training the country's national and local police. Despite much effort and money spent over the past few years, police forces are still prone to sectarianism. Many in Shiite parts of the country are believed to be beholden to Mr. Sadr's militia.
Capt. Mario Oliva, a US military officer involved in another retraining program for the national police dubbed "Re-blue," summed up the challenge as follows: "There is so much demand for police that they just hired people off the street. We need to polish them, get them in the right uniform, and teach them how to protect and not hurt their own people."
But the ICG's Hiltermann says that the problem lies deeper than that.
He says Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government was unwilling and incapable of rooting out sectarianism and that it was "folly" for the US to expect otherwise. "They are dysfunctional and too weak to do it. They are part of the sectarian conflict. This government is so much a part of the problem that you can't ask it to reach out to the other side, especially Sunnis."
Indeed, the Tal Afar bombing has provided fodder for Sunni hard-liners who oppose the Maliki government.
"This massacre just confirms what the association has always warned about, that is the complicity between government forces and militias in the pursuit of a hateful sectarian policy that serves only the interests of the enemies of our nation," said the Association of Muslim Scholars in a statement issued last week.
The Association's spokesman, Sheikh Bashar al-Faydhi, said in a phone interview from Amman that his group was willing "to issue a call to the resistance to lay down its weapons if America suspended its support for the current government and put a timetable for the withdrawal of its troops."
Another vociferous government critic, Sunni parliamentarian Adnan al-Dulaimi, also put out a statement warning that events in Tal Afar "threaten to push matters into the abyss, and the government and the US occupation forces must realize the gravity of these crimes, otherwise all hell will break loose ... and the flames will consume everyone."
Although the Iraqi government has sent its Army to keep the peace in Tal Afar and promised to prosecute the policemen involved in the revenge slayings, emotions were still high amid concerns that the fallout from events in Tal Afar would continue to reverberate throughout the country.
Families of the slain Sunnis were so terrified to go back to town that they decided to bury their loved ones in a nearby village, says Mohammed Taher, an official with the Iraqi Turkmen Front in Mosul.
"I blame the government and no one else," says Mr. Taher, a Sunni.
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