Many Iraqi Army Trainees Are Complicit With 'Enemy Targets'

WP: Many Trainees Are Complicit With 'Enemy Targets'
By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 4, 2007; Page A10

BAGHDAD -- The platoon of American soldiers was pinned down in an alley outside the holiest Shiite shrine in western Baghdad's Kadhimiyah neighborhood. Machine-gun fire sprayed from apartment windows and rooftops with a deafening clatter. The troops were 15 yards from their Humvees, but they didn't know if they could survive the dash.

Less than a mile away, a powerful Shiite parliament member stood inside an American military base, in the office of the Iraqi army brigade commander responsible for Kadhimiyah. The Americans had called for Iraqi army backup, but according to the brigade commander and American officers, the lawmaker would help ensure that no assistance arrived from the Iraqis that crucial day.

"No Iraqi army unit, of the 2,700 Iraqi security forces that are in Kadhimiyah, no Iraqi army unit would respond," said Lt. Col. Steven Miska, a deputy brigade commander based in this Shiite enclave of 200,000 people on the western shore of the Tigris River. "It shows you how difficult it is to root out the militia influence when they've got political top-cover."

The two-hour firefight under the golden domes of the Musa al-Kadhim shrine on April 29 left at least eight Iraqis dead. While no Americans were injured, it marked the start of the deterioration of security in Kadhimiyah, once one of Baghdad's safest neighborhoods. It also made plain -- "the first time the complicity was staring us right in the face," as one American soldier put it -- that the Iraqi army's problem in the area was about more than just being under-trained or ill-equipped.

Building up the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces has been a pillar of Gen. David H. Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, but the Iraqi army in Kadhimiyah is so thoroughly infiltrated with Mahdi Army militiamen that U.S. and Iraqi soldiers say it is close to useless. Iraqi soldiers in Kadhimiyah have been arrested and accused of attacking Americans and other Iraqi troops. Those who are not affiliated with the militia, which is loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, tend to be too frightened for their families to pursue their corrupt colleagues....

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