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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
On patrol with Iraq's ragtag army, a reporter discovers why American troops will not be coming home anytime soon.
May 23, 2005 | On the afternoon of Jan. 27 in the Sunni city of Baquba, north of Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi forces are hosting what they call a "peace day" at a provincial government building near one of the most dangerous parts of the city. The event is an opportunity for known insurgents to sign a pledge against violence in exchange for amnesty from arrest. Outside, Iraqi police and soldiers patrol the wide, garbage-lined streets on foot and in battered trucks that weave through traffic.
At an intersection just yards from the peace-day proceedings, a compact car pulls up alongside a police truck and explodes, scattering debris and body parts and riddling the police truck with shrapnel. Four policemen are gravely injured. Passersby drag them bleeding into a nearby shop while U.S. and Iraqi forces and ambulances race to the scene. For several minutes after the explosion, Iraqi cops speed up and down the street in their ubiquitous pickup trucks, firing machine guns at God knows what.
Scenes like this have become all too common the last five months, as insurgents have shifted from attacking U.S. troops to targeting Iraq's ill-equipped and in many cases poorly trained new security forces. A wave of suicide bombings since April 28, the date the new Iraqi Cabinet was sworn in, has claimed more than 500 Iraqi lives -- roughly half of them recruits for the security forces, including many police recruits waiting in line to apply for jobs.
According to the Pentagon, Iraqi forces -- police, army, border patrol and an independent oil-security force -- now total more than 150,000 men and women. Over the past several months, Pentagon officials have maintained that the Iraqi forces are steadily improving and growing in numbers -- and the top brass has talked up the prospect of drawing down U.S. troops in significant numbers by this summer, after handing off much of the responsibility for securing the country to the Iraqis.
But the last month's eruption of insurgent violence has underscored the weaknesses of the nascent security forces and cast into doubt Pentagon plans to bring U.S. troops home. U.S. generals themselves warned late last week that America's involvement in Iraq "could still fail."
Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American officer in the Middle East, pointed in particular to the Iraqi police forces, who he said lack ''sophistication, chain of command, [and] cohesion of leadership," and are susceptible to corruption and intimidation. ''I don't know how much I would say time-wise they're behind, but they are behind,'' he said, according to the Associated Press.
Some outside military experts -- as well as numerous U.S. soldiers who've worked side by side with the Iraqis, and with whom I patrolled in Iraq between January and May of this year -- don't foresee handing over responsibility to the Iraqis anytime soon.
"I would not expect to see a significant draw-down [of U.S. troops] prior to 2007, absent a significant falloff in the insurgency, which is not a prospect at the moment," says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org in Washington. "Restoring Iraq to military self-sufficiency will require at least a decade," he says. "For that reason alone, Iraq will remain an American protectorate well into the next decade."
Blaming this entirely on native forces and declaring them inadequate is an unfair generalization. Even despite the recent surge in violence, in some areas -- downtown Mosul, for example -- Iraqi forces have begun limited independent operations. And some types of forces -- particularly the border patrol, special police, and units in the Kurdish northern part of the country -- have proved themselves by operating independently and at full strength. In late March, I even spent a couple of days traveling with Iraqi army soldiers around the northern town of Sulaymaniyah, without any U.S. escort -- a veritable death sentence in many other parts of Iraq. The troops in Sulaymaniyah were well-equipped, disciplined and led by experienced, competent officers who had been transferred to the Iraqi military from the Kurdish peshmerga militia.
Establishing reliable security forces elsewhere in Iraq has proved a difficult and sometimes Sisyphean task. Despite the wave of deadly attacks, U.S. commanders maintain that the number of Iraqis volunteering to enlist continues to far outnumber the places available in training courses, which are aimed at bringing the number of Iraqi forces to about 300,000 by the end of next year.
But getting Iraqi forces to perform is another matter. "The Iraqi security forces were close to meeting their force-structure goals last summer," Pike says, "but then the goals went way up and the forces on hand collapsed."
Pike is referring to the widespread flight of Iraqi police and army troops in the aftermath of the November 2004 battle for Fallujah.
"It all happened in two weeks," says Lt. Col. Bradley Becker of the meltdown of Iraqi police and army in his area. Becker commands a battalion of the 25th Infantry Division from Fort Lewis, Wash. Since October, Becker's battalion has patrolled the dusty approaches to Mosul, an area known to U.S. soldiers as Q-West, after its most important town, Qayyarah.
In early November, in the wake of the battle for Fallujah, Q-West, which had been pretty peaceful to that point, "fell apart," in the words of Maj. Kevin Murphy, 36, Becker's operations officer. Rather than stand and fight, most police in Q-West dropped their weapons and ran. They never came back.
By mid-November, Becker says, "I went from 2,000 police to 50." There was a similar exodus in the Iraqi army. "Let me tell you, there were some sleepless nights," he says.
Around the same time, Iraqi police in the contested city of Samarra "dissolved" under insurgent attacks, according to 42nd Infantry Division Capt. Robert Giordano. U.S. troops in Mosul, Samarra and elsewhere had no choice but to rebuild local forces from scratch beginning in November. Civilian police trainers were brought in from the States to finish the job, and they continue to operate from an Iraqi army base near Sulaymaniyah.
Giordano says the new Samarra police force is "excellent." He may be right: Despite several attacks in recent weeks, Samarra's police haven't suffered another meltdown. Yet.
Iraqi forces in Q-West have undergone a similar renaissance. As a result of six months of intensive effort by Becker's troops and other coalition forces, Iraqi forces in the area are back up to strength: There are three battalions of 500 Iraqi soldiers each manning checkpoints and outposts in Q-West. And hundreds of Iraqi police operate out of new stations in Qayyarah and surrounding towns. They too have stood up to recent attacks.
Today, Iraqi forces in Q-West are "capable of semi-independent operations," in Murphy's estimation.
What a "semi-independent" operation looks like is demonstrated on the cold night of March 25, near Qayyarah. Tom Burns, a second lieutenant in the 25th Infantry Division, leads a joint American-Iraqi patrol looking for smugglers and insurgents on the area's remote, dusty roads. The Americans are in two speedy, heavily armored Stryker vehicles; the Iraqis trail behind in pickup trucks. Every couple of miles, the Strykers have to idle to let the pickups catch up, eliciting rolled eyes and muttered epithets from Burns and his crew.
Spotting a good vantage point atop a steep hill that only the Strykers can mount, Burns, 22, decides to leave the Iraqi trucks guarding a secondary road. But in the spirit of cooperation -- and just in case he needs someone who speaks Arabic -- Burns gestures at several young Iraqis to climb into his vehicle. Gazing back at the Iraqis he's leaving behind, Burns shakes his head and mutters, "Like little lost sheep."
