April 4, 2006

IRAQ's Interior Ministry is refusing to deploy thousands of police recruits trained by the United States and Britain and is hiring its own men and putting them on the streets, according to Western security advisers.

The disclosure comes amid growing US and British concern about the role of partisan militias in sectarian killings, and their links to top Iraqi politicians.

"You can't have in a democracy various groups with arms — you have to have the state with a monopoly on power," Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, said yesterday, at the end of her two-day visit to Baghdad.

"We have sent very, very strong messages repeatedly, and not just on this visit, that one of the first things … is that there is going to be a reining in of the militias … It's got to be one of the highest priorities."

The Interior Ministry, which is controlled by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), has not deployed any graduates of the Civilian Police Assistance Training Team (CPATT), a joint US/British unit, for the past three months.

CPATT was designed to put the police on a fair footing after Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Its goal is to train 134,000 officers by the end of the year.

The ministry's refusal to use the new graduates is causing alarm. "There are concerns about the infiltration of the police by extremist groups," a Western security adviser said.

Ministry officials say they refuse to deploy the graduates because they have no control over the CPATT selection process. Sunni politicians and residents of Baghdad have claimed that the ministry supports "death squads" responsible for abducting and murdering hundreds of Sunnis in recent weeks.

In one incident last week, men dressed in the camouflage uniforms of police commandos drove up in three vehicles and stormed into an electrical appliances store in Mansour, a middle-class Sunni district of west Baghdad. They rounded up three young women employees and five males in a room and shot them dead.

It emerged late last year that the Interior Ministry has been running secret detention centres. US troops discovered two prisons in which more than 800 men and boys, mostly Sunnis, were held in shocking conditions.

Under the Iraqi constitution, only the Justice Ministry is allowed to run prisons.

No figures are available for the police's religious and ethnic make-up outside Iraqi Kurdistan, partly because there is no central database, but estimates put it at 80 per cent Shiite. Until recently the special police and commando units were 99 per cent Shiite, according to a CPATT spokesperson.

Charges that the police were becoming partisan developed after Bayan Jabr, a SCIRI leader, became Interior Minister last April. The SCIRI's powerful armed wing, the Badr Organisation, was founded in Iran during SCIRI's 20-year exile from Saddam's Iraq.

■In the deadliest day for American forces since early January, at least nine members of the military were killed in the insurgent stronghold of Anbar province, including four in a rebel attack and at least five when their truck accidentally overturned.