- BAGHDAD (Reuters) - It will
be at least another year before Baghdad's streets are safe, the chief of
the Iraqi police said on Tuesday, and that is only if the number of officers
is doubled and training is vastly improved.
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- General Ahmed Qadim said too few police were on the streets,
and those on patrols were paid too little and worked too hard.
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- "It will be one year before Baghdad is safe, and
then only if we have more police, more training and more equipment,"
Qadim, who is also Iraq's deputy interior minister, told Reuters as he
sat in his well-protected Baghdad headquarters.
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- "The police are working too much, they are tired,
they can't work night and day... We need many more officers and they must
be young men who don't think like in the past," he said.
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- Baghdad is notoriously insecure. There are almost daily
attacks against U.S. troops in the capital, and in recent months insurgents
have attacked softer targets such as police stations.
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- There are some 7,000 officers in the capital and around
75,000 countrywide, but Qadim said Baghdad, a city of around five million,
needed a force twice as big and the country at least 125,000 officers.
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- In London, a city with a similar number of residents,
there are about 30,000 police -- and no insurgency.
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- Seen as collaborators by anti-American insurgents, Iraqi
police often fall prey to bomb attacks and drive-by shootings.
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- Qadim said around 150 policemen had been killed in the
seven months since the force was set up, a higher death rate for the size
of the service than U.S. troops have suffered.
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- Yet Iraqis have still flocked to join the police -- a
well-paid job in a country where unemployment is sky-high.
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- SCARCE RESOURCES
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- New recruits are paid about $120 a month -- a salary
that prompted several hundred members of the new Iraqi army to desert last
month, thinking they'd be better off as policemen.
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- But Qadim said $150 would be more fair. "With that
amount, they could not be unhappy," he said.
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- Training is scant and many officers have to cobble together
their own uniform. Many wear civilian clothes, and it is often only a blue
Iraqi Police armband that identifies them as such.
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- "We need better and faster training, guns, special
cars, uniforms for winter, communications equipment and more money for
salaries," said Qadim as he fiddled with his U.S.-issued pistol.
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- He also worried about getting the job done. When an attack
occurs on something other than the U.S. Army, the military often says the
Iraqi police will conduct the investigation.
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- Qadim said it was not that easy. On New Year's Eve, a
car bomb destroyed a Baghdad restaurant killing eight people and wounding
30. Qadim was on the scene within minutes, but he couldn't do much investigating.
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- "We don't have the equipment or the technology.
I can go and collect a hair or some fingerprints, but then what do I do
with them? We need forensic help from the Americans."
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- Probes into the car-bombing of the Jordanian embassy
last August, attacks on police stations and a bomb blast at a mosque in
the holy city of Najaf that killed 80 people are ongoing.
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- Qadim shrugged when asked when they would be finished.
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- "The Americans will have to stay and help us,"
he said. (With additional reporting by Huda Majeed)
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