By Mariam Karouny
Reuters, 29 March 2006
BAGHDAD - Iraq's interior minister, a focus for complaints about sectarian death squads operating in the police, insisted he was cleaning up the ministry but said there was still some way to go.
Bayan Jabor told Reuters, however, he did not want to stay in the job once a national unity government is formed.
The Shi'ite Islamist has been publicly, if indirectly, accused by the U.S. ambassador of fostering sectarian bias.
In an interview late on Tuesday, he accused U.S. diplomats of trying to discredit him, most recently with a raid on a jail that had echoes of a scandal in November when dozens of abused Sunni detainees were found at a secret ministry bunker. Jabor said the bunker incident was still under investigation.
He said he had been fighting what he called "corruption" in the police since taking up his post 10 months ago in the interim administration. He had fired nearly 4,000 personnel but complained ethnic and sectarian sensitivities made it hard.
"I have suffered over these 10 months, fighting terrorism and cleaning up the ministry," he said in his office in the heavily fortified Adnan Palace, once occupied by Saddam Hussein.
Among successes, he said, was the virtual defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Jabor said he was "finished" -- an assessment at odds with that of military intelligence sources in U.S.-led forces in Baghdad.
DIFFICULT DECISIONS
A push against insurgents northeast of the capital, where many believe Zarqawi is now based, was planned for April and Jabor said 1,000 key Sunni rebels could "easily" be rounded up.
"We still have to make more efforts to clean up the ministry. Sometimes I hesitate to take difficult decisions due to ethnic and sectarian calculations," he said.
He did not elaborate but seemed to be suggesting local police chiefs in, for example, Sunni areas were hard to remove even when there are suspicions they cooperate with rebels.
Asked when the purge might be complete, he said: "I think by the end of this year -- if we have political stability."
At least 3,000 policemen had been fired for "cooperating with terrorists", he said, as well as 800 who were "criminals".
Highlighting achievements in a week when gunmen dressed as police commandos have raided Baghdad shops and businesses, abducting and killing people and stealing cash, Jabor said the ministry had recently arrested a major general and 17 other policemen for running kidnap and extortion rackets.
He said many of those carrying out killings in police uniform were imposters -- but they operated with inside help.
Accounts are common around Baghdad, particularly among Sunni families, of relatives being taken away in the night by men in police uniform. Bound and executed bodies are then found later.
Jabor rejects accusations that, as a leading member of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's SCIRI, he has overseen the recruitment of members of the party's armed wing, the formerly Iranian-trained Badr organisation, into the police.
The principle focus of his security operations were now the western, Sunni provinces of Anbar and Diyala, a volatile, mixed area to the northeast of Baghdad, he said.
"Soon we will have a big operation in and around Diyala," he said. "Within a month we will sort it out with a military operation involving defence, interior and multinational forces."
The biggest threats, however, were no longer al Qaeda but Saddam's Baathist followers led by former vice president Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri and senior official Mohammed Younis Ahmed.
"We heard that Zarqawi this week quit the leadership of al Qaeda. What is left is the work of Saddamists," he said.
He gave no details of the intelligence on Zarqawi, whom U.S. and Iraqi officials blamed for last month's Samarra shrine bombing that fuelled an increase in sectarian killings.
A source in U.S.-led military intelligence said a relative lull in al Qaeda attacks may be tactical and said Zarqawi seemed to remain a key figure and a major recruiting draw.
END OF ZARQAWI?
"I'm telling you, Zarqawi is finished," Jabor insisted. "He only has a few supporters in Ramadi" in western Iraq, he said.
"The operation is led by Baathists and Saddamists and it will be easy to eliminate them ... There are maybe 1,000 left and we will start a campaign to round them up."
The dapper, slightly built minister said, however, he may not stay on to supervise, saying his future was in the hands of the Shi'ite Alliance in talks on a coalition.
"I hope I won't be the next interior minister," he said. "It is up to the Alliance but what I would like to do is return to my work as a civil engineer. That is my specialty."
Jabor acknowledged that his relationship with U.S. officials is fraught. He said he had received an apology from the U.S. commander in Iraq, General George Casey, over a military raid on Sunday on a site where several ministry personnel were arrested.
"They were expecting to find tortured people, Iraqis from certain sects and then they use it," he said, recalling the embarrassment of the bunker raid by U.S. troops in November.
In fact, he said, the only prisoners were 17 Sudanese awaiting deportation for visa infringements: "Some in the U.S. embassy want to harm the Interior Ministry and the Alliance.
"But they got nothing."
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Citation: Mariam Karouny. "Iraq interior minister says battling gangs in police," Reuters, 29 March 2006.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/KAR940917.htm
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