Iraqis ready to join police in Baghdad hotspots

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Mazen Majid Abd quit the Iraqi police last year after Sunni Islamist militants overran his neighborhood in Baghdad and threatened him. But as a U.S. drive to quell violence starts to pay off, he's joining up again.

Abd is one of more than 200 people in the Sunni area of Khadra hoping to put on a police uniform and work with the national police, the Iraqi army and U.S. forces to keep Sunni al Qaeda insurgents out of the community.

An uprising by tribal leaders against al Qaeda insurgents in the western Iraqi province of Anbar was seen as a turning point that led to the once-perilous desert region becoming far safer for Iraqi and U.S. forces alike.

In the capital, it is more than four months since Washington completed a troop buildup to stem the daily violence. Now U.S. forces are on a drive to establish community police units to allow locals to consolidate improvements in security.

Getting Iraqi security forces into a position to maintain security will be crucial as Washington plans to draw down troop numbers in 2008.

In Khadra, they want 200 men from the community to form a local police unit to keep insurgents out of their neighborhood. Some 220 locals have signed up so far in two recruitment drives, and those selected will go to a police academy for training.

Abd, 24, was in the police before: "A terrorist threatened, me so I quit."

But now he feels safe enough to go through the selection procedure again.

"For a few months I couldn't go home, but now there are a lot of security changes happening. I am a resident from this area, so it's good that I'm going back to my job. We need to clean it up more as there are still bad people here."

Under Saddam Hussein, minority Sunni Arabs held sway in Iraq. Areas in Baghdad such as Khadra and neighboring Jamiaa were relatively affluent Sunni communities.

But in the past couple of years, Sunni Islamist militants moved in en masse to use the areas as a base for targeting U.S. and Iraqi forces. As a result, some 70 percent of the homes in some districts were deserted as residents fled the violence.

GETTING IT RIGHT

U.S. Army Captain Dan Cannon is based at a joint security station in Khadra where U.S. forces work with the Iraqi army and the national police to tackle violence.

"It's come a long way in the last six months," he said. "All the local nationals had basically got pushed out by al Qaeda or sympathizers. Now we've probably toppled about 10 cells."

Cannon said when he first came into Khadra there were two to three attacks a day, mostly roadside bombs on main roads targeting the police. Now, there are one or two incidents a week, mostly criminal in nature.

Haitham Guewar, 30, fled to Khadra from the predominantly Shi'ite area of Zaafaraniya in south Baghdad to seek sanctuary after two of his brothers were killed for being Sunnis.

He was studying for a master's degree in chemical engineering, but now he wants to join the police in Khadra.

"We're tired of the bad people, so we stood up to them to help the Iraqi government and U.S. forces."

Talib Jasim, a member of Khadra's neighborhood council, has been drumming up volunteers for the recruitment drive and is heartened by similar ventures in districts such as Ghazaliya to the north of Khadra and Amiriya to the south.

"Why has it succeeded? Because it's the people in the community doing it," he said. "Every tribal leader is inviting the people to turn against al Qaeda, because these people are bad, they damage everything. They do not belong to this city."

The U.S. military recognizes the risk that some volunteers may have been militant sympathizers or criminals.

Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Chesney, commander of 1st Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, was assigned in June to take on militants in these hotbeds of violence in western Baghdad.

He argues that criminal elements among the volunteers can be weeded out, first by informants in the area, and then by the interior and defense ministries, who vet the lists.

Some critics say the U.S. forces are just legitimizing tribal militias and armed neighborhood watch groups and letting them take charge of checkpoints.

Indeed, the volunteers in Jamiaa have just thrown a spanner in the works -- they are simply looking for the right to man armed checkpoints and are not interested in becoming policemen.

The government has approved the volunteer list, but the recruits include many former Iraqi army officers under Saddam, and they look down on the idea of becoming policemen.

This is a setback. But Chesney is philosophical, saying U.S. commanders have the flexibility to slow down the process if it's not working as planned, or the recruits are not representative of the sectarian mix in the area.

"This is not a rush to failure," he said. The key is to get the right volunteers."