New Iraqi forces face security test at polls
SAMARRA, Iraq -- Major Osama's newly minted Iraqi Interior Ministry commandos poked through oil-soaked auto-repair yards and found a homemade bomb and a car stuffed with weapons. It was a small, painstaking success against insurgents who blew up five Iraqi soldiers not far away four days earlier, and have slain at least 375 Iraqi troops and civilians this month alone.
Osama's men are among the best of the US-trained Iraqi forces that the American military calls its only ticket out of Iraq, and on Sunday, they will face their most crucial test yet as they guard voters from expected attacks during national elections. But they need black ski masks to hide their faces and US soldiers to protect and guide them. Osama does not want to give his last name for fear of retribution.
On election day, Osama's unit must back up newer, untested Iraqi forces, including a brand-new Public Order Battalion that had more than 200 men until half failed to show up after a recent home leave.
"They'll stand and fight -- as long as we're with them," Captain Adam Wojack, the US adviser to the 150-man commando team, said of Samarra's fledgling forces as he rested after the auto-shop mission at Patrol Base Razor, on the edge of this Sunni Muslim city 60 miles north of Baghdad. Extra cement barriers have ringed the US outpost since July 6, when a suicide car bomber, wearing an Iraqi police uniform, killed five US troops and three Iraqi National Guardsmen there, scaring all but 50 of the town's 500 guardsmen off the job.
Samarra, where Iraqi police and military units have repeatedly disintegrated under insurgent attack, is a case study of the vicious circle US troops face as they struggle to set up credible Iraqi security forces. Iraq's new forces, created to replace the army disbanded under the US occupation, tend to collapse without close US supervision. But closer cooperation also makes the Iraqis more vulnerable to being branded collaborators, and US officials say that handing over more security duties to Iraqis is the only way the United States can eventually pull out of Iraq.
The US struggle to set up credible Iraqi forces has taken on new urgency as Iraqis prepare to elect a new national legislature on Sunday. US military commanders say they will make training Iraqi forces the top priority after the election, reassigning up to 10,000 troops as advisers who would train and fight alongside Iraqis. That plan was endorsed by retired Army General Gary Luck, who last week reviewed the Iraq strategy for the Pentagon.
"We can't stay in front on this over the long haul and be successful," General George Casey, commander of US forces in Iraq, said at a round-table talk on Wednesday. "We're an outside force. We're viewed by the people . . . as an occupation force. The Iraqis need to be the ones that are going after people and doing the raids."
But he acknowledged that Iraqi forces will not be ready for at least a year. "Are they capable of taking over the counterinsurgency campaign themselves right now today? The answer is no," Casey said.
The United States says it has trained 130,000 Iraqi security forces, but officials acknowledge that most have only cursory training. US military officials say the keys to better success are to train soldiers and police for longer periods, to let them train as a group with their officers before putting them in the field, and to have more of them live and fight with their US trainers.
Wojack is one of several officers conducting the training for the First Infantry Division, which is responsible for four provinces including Salahuddin, home to Samarra and Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit. The division says it is putting 430 Iraqi soldiers a month through three to four weeks of training.
But even with the higher level of training and monthly salaries of $300 and up -- more than most Iraqi professionals earn -- large numbers of troops do not come back after home leaves, US officers say. And not without reason: Insurgents are increasingly hitting Iraqi security forces, who were targeted in 28 percent of attacks in the division's area this month, up from 15 percent over the summer.
The shifting fortunes of Samarra's security forces tell a story repeated across Iraq, about the difficulty of finding recruits who neither support the insurgents nor flee from them.
Since Lieutenant Colonel Eric Schacht's battalion, Task Force 1-26, took over the area in March, Schacht explains with a weary smile, Samarra has had five police chiefs. At the moment, it has no police at all.
The problems began, Schacht said, on April 11, when the 202d Battalion of the Iraqi National Guard, mainly from Samarra, disintegrated as uprisings broke out in Fallujah, Samarra, and other Sunni Muslim areas. The battalion had 750 soldiers, but under insurgent pressure, Schacht said, "in eight hours it went to 40."
When US authorities handed formal sovereignty to the Iraqi government in June, tribal leaders in Samarra wanted US troops out of the center of the city. US commanders complied. Days later, on July 6, the car bomb hit at Razor. The shakily rebuilt 202d Battalion collapsed again. The police folded, too. "Bottom line, it became a safe haven for anti-Iraqi forces," Schacht said.
US troops conducted three incursions into Samarra over the summer, and on Oct. 8, with the Iraqi government's blessing, stormed the city center with only one US soldier killed.
They brought in three units of Iraqi troops -- all from outside the city, on the theory that Samarrans would be unwilling to arrest their neighbors and relatives. Some were Sunnis from elsewhere in the province; others were Shi'ites from other cities, including Osama's unit.
The police were problematic. They went to sleep at night without posting guards. On Nov. 6, they were routed in a night attack.
But the three Iraqi military battalions here, which total less than 1,000 personnel, have held together in the face of relentless attacks, participating in raids with US troops. Osama's troops have made numerous arrests, acting on their own intelligence. But they are not making enough headway in getting information from Samarra's 200,000 people, Schacht said. He said it is not fear but family ties that stop residents from turning in insurgents.
"Until they make the decision that they want a better society -- and that means their uncle, their cousin, their brother needs to end up being detained -- then this is going to continue," he said.
Samarrans say they want the Iraqi forces to take over security from Americans. But at the same time, they complain loudly about the Iraqis' most visible function, a traffic checkpoint that forces scores of cars to line up to cross the bridge to the main highway as they search for weapons. Some view the troops, as they zip through the city brandishing AK-47s from the backs of pickup trucks, as impotent. "We call them scarecrows," said Mohammed Ismail Bakr, 33, a doctor.
They are also vulnerable. On the way to bring food to officers at one checkpoint on Jan. 20, five members of the 202d were burned to death after their truck struck a mine. "You couldn't pay me to drive anywhere in a soft-skinned vehicle with an AK," said Captain Benjamin Marlin, who commands one of two companies based in the center of Samarra.
Insurgents are signaling that they will challenge the Iraqi troops, whose main election day job is to guard polling sites. Yesterday a car bomb in Samarra killed an Iraqi soldier and two civilians, wounding four more Iraqi troops, and insurgents forced people out of a school that was to be a polling site and then blew it up.
But on patrol Sunday, Osama's troops were game as they searched an industrial area for bomb-making materials, led by Wojack and other Americans. Some shopkeepers watched in exasperation as the soldiers cut locks from doors.
Several times, Osama's men detained Iraqis, only to find they could not communicate with Wojack about what they were being told. Interpreter after interpreter has quit out of fear, Wojack said. The lack of skilled interpreters also means it takes half an hour to translate an incident report -- when split-second coordination could be needed.
"I can't believe you guys are having the same problem we did, 18 months later," said Captain Jeff Bennett of the Third Infantry Division, who will take over Wojack's job next month and remembered the language barrier from his first tour in Iraq.
Wojack said that US forces will have to play a major role in security on election day. "We're guaranteeing security in the city now," he said. "It would be weird if we pulled back for elections."
Globe staffer Thanassis Cambanis and an Iraqi correspondent contributed to this story. Anne Barnard can be reached at abarnard@globe.com. 