Iraqis ready to join police in Baghdad hotspots

By David Clarke

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.