January 16, 2006|By NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON -- U.S. commanders are assigning more than 2,000 Army military police advisers to work side by side with Iraq police officers in one of the most extensive efforts yet to team Americans with uniformed Iraqis.
The effort, a mission that entails significant new security risks for U.S. forces, is just starting in Baghdad. It will expand to local stations and provincial and district headquarters in all 18 provinces by the end of the month. It greatly increases the size and scope of the current field training by 500 international civilian police advisers and some military police units, U.S. military officials say.
About 80,000 local police officers across Iraq are certified as trained and equipped, more than halfway toward the goal of 135,000 by early 2007.
But senior commanders, including Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. officer in Iraq, have vowed to make 2006 "the year of the police" in a tacit acknowledgment that corruption, ineptitude and infiltration in the Iraqi police forces stand in the way of any plan by the United States to draw down troops this year.
U.S. commanders have complained that armed militia have infiltrated the police department in Basra, Iraq's third-largest city. And they are concerned about the recurrence of a police failure like the one in Mosul in November 2004, when a 5,000-man force deserted in the face of a militant uprising, sending Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, into chaos.
The Pentagon has budgeted more than $1 billion this year to train, field and equip Iraqi Interior Ministry forces, of which the police are by far the largest single component, said Ann Bertucci, a military spokeswoman.
Senior U.S. officers say their goal has long been to train Iraqi police officers so they can take over law enforcement duties in the coming months from Iraqi army units who are now relieving U.S. troops.
