The Iraqi national police force has opened two new training facilities in the western province of Al Anbar, a significant step towards cementing improving security in the region, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials. The academies in Ramadi and Habbaniyah can house nearly 4,000 students at a time for courses lasting as long as 90 days.
The Ramadi academy is larger, with billets for 3,000 versus Habbaniyah’s 750. Both are staffed by Iraqi and coalition trainers. The academies train mostly local recruits who will remain in their home towns after graduation. “They are going to stay in this city because they know this city,” Iraqi Brigadier General Abdul Karim Khalaf, from the Interior Ministry, says of Ramadi. Despite being in predominantly Sunni communities and serving mostly Sunni trainees, Khalaf says the academies have the full support of the Shi’ite-dominated Interior Ministry.
The Habbaniyah academy was deliberately constructed next door to the headquarters of the local Iraqi Army 1st Division, in order to improve cooperation between the army and police, according to U.S. Army Brigadier General David Phillips, a career military policeman who is deputy commander of the coalition’s Civilian Police Assistance Training Team.
The opening of the new police academies coincides with what U.S. commanders call a “turnaround” in regional security.
“In Al Anbar we’ve seen local leadership wanting to get Al Qaeda out of their area. They’re taking action,” says Brigadier General Robert Holmes, Deputy Director of Operations at U.S. Central Command in Tampa.
As part of the turnaround, Sunni tribes have fielded what Phillips calls “neighborhood watches” – armed bodies of men tasked with defending their own communities against infiltrators. The community watch groups are “working hand-in-hand” with U.S. and Iraqi forces. In this environment, police recruitment remains strong. “We do not have shortage of individuals requesting to join the police,” Phillips reports.
“Comparing Al Anbar to what I saw just a few months ago is night and day,” Phillips says. “Commerce is working, stores are back open and you get small kids out on the streets waving as you drive past.”
Next up, according to Phillips, is the construction across Iraq of “rule of law complexes” that combine police and judicial facilities and cut back on delays in getting criminal suspects to trial. Phillips credits the flagship complex in Baghdad with greatly improving law enforcement and easing jail crowding.
Cross-posted at Military.com
Related posts:
Working your own neighborhood is fine, but I’d also institute a system of rotations, say 10% of each precinct’s cops working in another area at any given time, and 10% of each cop’s time spent working elsewhere.
Not only would this open up the eyes and awareness of individuals, it would facilitate exchange of ideas and tactics, plus form contact points for quick future communication and cooperation. Eventually, it would lead to (one hopes) a sense of professionalism that overrode the parochial hometown attitudes and exclusive loyalties of security forces, especially officers.
[...] Related: Al Anbar cops turn a corner Brits say cops improving Basra cops murder U.S. journo Basra cops = extremists? No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI Leave a comment Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong> [...]
[...] Increasingly effective Iraqi forces have played a key role in these recent successes, as they did in the capture of the Ramadi bomber. Like extremist groups, these forces need to recruit constantly in order to maintain and grow the existing force. Also like AQI and other terror groups, this recruitment depends upon a message. For extremists, it’s a message of hate and violence. For Iraqi forces, it’s a message of unity, according to U.S. Navy Captain David Pine, a trainer for Iraqi military senior staff. [...]
[...] But then came the much-heralded “Anbar awakening” – a banding-together of Sunni sheiks and their militias into a loose alliance that fought alongside U.S. and federal Iraqi forces to all but eradicate terrorist cells in Ramadi and other large western towns. As security improved in Al Anbar, U.S. “Provincial Reconstruction Teams” – some military-led, some commanded by State Department specialists – moved to restore Ramadi’s connection to the national power grid. Now 80 percent of residents have regular power, according to Colonel John Charlton, an Army commander in the province. [...]