Up to 30,000 Iraqi police officers are to be sacked for being incompetent and unreliable and given a US$60 million payoff before the US hands over to an Iraqi government, senior British military sources said on Wednesday.
Many officers either deserted to the insurgents or simply stayed at home during the recent uprisings in Fallujah and across the south.
Fourteen months after the war and just a week before the Iraqis take power on June 30, the sources revealed serious shortfalls of properly trained police and soldiers and vital equipment.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The problems are particularly critical because 35 new police checkpoints are to be set up across Baghdad before the handover.
US officials have repeatedly warned that violence is likely to escalate ahead of the ceremony.
Although the US has set aside US$3.5 billion to rebuild the security forces, much of the training and many of the contracts have yet to be completed.
The police forces, now the first line of defense, are being drastically overhauled.
There are 120,000 officers on the payroll, although only 89,000 turn up for work -- and more than half of these have still had no training. Those who do not turn up are either ghost employees left over from the previous corrupt system or are permanently absent. Most will be encouraged to retire.
In addition, up to 30,000 regular police officers who are now deemed unsuitable will be sacked and replaced by properly vetted and trained recruits. Some were hired under former president Saddam Hussein's regime but others are among those recruited in the past year. Each officer will receive US$1,000 to US$2,000 in severance pay -- a total package of up to US$60 million.
"The feeling is this will allow them to generate a business and feed their family and not force them to become fighters," one source said.
An army of 25,000 is also planned but the first 5,000 soldiers are still in training.
A paramilitary force, now known as the Iraqi national guard, should have 51,000 troops but has only 35,000. The security forces are also desperately short of equipment, having less than 5 percent of the radios, a quarter of the body armor, a third of the vehicles and slightly more than half the weapons they need.
A total of 253,000 weapons have been ordered from contractors, but only 141,000 have arrived so far. Of the 57,000 radios on order, there are only 2,500 in Iraq. And of the 25,000 vehicles needed, there are only 8,500.
The high demand for body armor has been particularly difficult to meet. Of the 174,000 sets procured, only 40,000 have so far been received. "We have saturated the global market," another British military source said.
Colonel James Mulvenna, an American officer who is chief of staff on the coalition's training team, said the program for building barracks and bases for the Iraqi army was three months behind schedule. Most work had been farmed out to private contractors, who were increasingly being targeted.
"The contractors are facing security issues," Mulvenna said in a separate briefing. "It is hard to do construction in the middle of an insurgency. There are also funding delays."
The insurgency had also forced a switch in priorities away from the army and toward the police.
"I've had to move people away from training the army to training the police," Mulvenna said. "One army base has had to be switched and given to the police civil intervention force."
This specialized new force, designed to handle riots and recapture police stations seized by militias, will consist of around 5,000 men.
Training will take several months.
The army is also building an intervention force to conduct urban warfare, but here too the program is slow. While the plan is to have some 7,500 men, only one battalion of around 700 will be ready to deploy in Baghdad by June 30. Another will be ready by August but the next does not come on line until December.
The problems are in part due to the colossal task facing the US and UK military in rebuilding the Iraqi state, but the sources said they were also a result of logistical breakdowns, unclear policies and an apparent rush to recruit troops many of whom are now recognized as unsuitable. There had been too much pressure to sign up large numbers and not enough vetting of individual candidates, the sources said.
James Watson — the Nobel laureate co-credited with the pivotal discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, but whose career was later tainted by his repeated racist remarks — has died, his former lab said on Friday. He was 97. The eminent biologist died on Thursday in hospice care on Long Island in New York, announced the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was based for much of his career. Watson became among the 20th century’s most storied scientists for his 1953 breakthrough discovery of the double helix with researcher partner Francis Crick. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he shared the
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
IMPASSE: US President Donald Trump pressed to end the filibuster in a sign that he is unlikely to compromise despite Democrat offers for a delayed healthcare vote The US government shutdown stretched into its 40th day yesterday even as senators stayed in Washington for a grueling weekend session hoping to find an end to the funding fight that has disrupted flights nationwide, threatened food assistance for millions of Americans and left federal workers without pay. The US Senate has so far shown few signs of progress over a weekend that could be crucial for the shutdown fight. Republican leaders are hoping to hold votes on a new package of bills that would reopen the government into January while also approving full-year funding for several parts of government, but
TOWERING FIGURE: To Republicans she was emblematic of the excesses of the liberal elite, but lawmakers admired her ability to corral her caucus through difficult votes Nancy Pelosi, a towering figure in US politics, a leading foe of US President Donald Trump and the first woman to serve as US House of Representatives speaker, on Thursday announced that she would step down at the next election. Admired as a master strategist with a no-nonsense leadership style that delivered for her party, the 85-year-old Democrat shepherded historic legislation through the US Congress as she navigated a bitter partisan divide. In later years, she was a fierce adversary of Trump, twice leading his impeachment and stunning Washington in 2020 when she ripped up a copy of his speech to the
RSS