Iraqi Police Force Faces Shake-Up
Iraq's Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry, whose police forces have been accused of complicity in sectarian attacks, has fired 3,000 employees accused of corruption or rights abuses and will change top commanders, a spokesman said Saturday.
Thousands have died this year in the cycle of killings between Shiite and Sunni death squads. Suspected Shiite militiamen have killed 26 Sunni-Arab rivals in a city north of Baghdad this weekend, raising the toll in the latest round of killings to 43.
Authorities also said they discovered the headless bodies of 17 Shiite construction workers in an orchard outside Baghdad, kidnapped and decapitated in apparent retaliation for an attack on Sunni Arabs last week.
The decapitated corpses were found Friday outside the city of Duluiyah, 45 miles north of Baghdad, along with four other unknown victims, also beheaded.
The killings of the workers came after the kidnapping Wednesday of three Sunni Arabs in Duluiyah by a Shiite militia based in Balad, police said. The three were killed and their bodies burned. After the discovery of the bodies late Friday and early Saturday, Sunni families living near Balad were starting to flee their homes, fearing Shiite retaliation.
In other developments:
Amid the growing tensions between Sunni Arabs and Shiites, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah met Saturday with prominent Iraqi clerics from both sects in the Islamic holy city of Mecca and urged them to seek an end to the violence to allow the two sides to reconcile.
"My brothers, we need now patience, calmness and quiet to get to know each other," the king told them.
Spokesman Abdul-Karim Khalaf said the Interior Ministry shake-up would ensure stronger action to stop the violence.
"We are working on reshuffling the ministry's vital posts like (the leaders of the) police commandos and public order forces, as well as some undersecretaries," he told The Associated Press, without elaborating.
He said most of the 3,000 employees who had been removed since May were suspected of corruption or human rights violations, but did not specify whether they were involved in militia activities. Up to 600 of them will face prosecution, he said.
The Shiite-led national police force, controlled by the Interior Ministry, is widely accused of being infiltrated by Shiite militias blamed in slayings of Sunni Arabs. Critics say Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been reluctant to move against the militias since many are linked to parties in his coalition.
The U.S. embarked on an intensive neighborhood-by-neighborhood sweep of the capital in August in a crackdown on the killings.
But Sadr City, the sprawling Shiite slum of about 2 million where radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia draws much of its support, has been left alone, and U.S. commanders say they are waiting on the command from al-Maliki's government.
When al-Maliki's government was formed in May, Interior Minister Jawad Bolani was given the post as top security official in large part because he had no militia links. But his lack of militia connections also has given him less leverage to make change.
Earlier this month, an entire brigade of some 700 policemen was suspended from service and taken to barracks because of suspected militia sympathies. The commander of one of the brigade's battalions faces criminal prosecution and others are being investigated.
The troops were suspected of allowing Shiite militias to operate freely in their area, where there had been a mass kidnapping of some two dozen people from a frozen food factory, at least seven of whom have since been found dead.
Problems with the brigade emerged during a broad brigade-by-brigade assessment of police in Baghdad carried out by the U.S. military over the summer. At the time it was taken off line, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, suggested many of the policemen were involved in allowing death squads to operate and would not be brought back.
Still, Khalaf played down the role of the ministry's police forces in militia violence, blaming instead the Facilities Protection Service, rather than the police. The FPS, created to guard government buildings and infrastructure, has some 150,000 members but an unclear command structure.
He said the FPS is not working under the supervision of either the Interior or Defense ministries. U.S. commanders also have said FPS members may be carrying out a large portion of the killings.
The Interior Ministry also has said that many attacks are carried out by people impersonating either Iraqi soldiers or police, and this month introduced new uniforms for certain units and new markings for police vehicles.