In January the correctional process in Fallujah was a two-room jail at police headquarters and an anonymous investigative adjudicate “who wrote in green [ink],” according to former guard convert aggroup (PiTT) Executive Officer Tad Scott. As IPs began to conduct mass roll-ups of suspected insurgents the confine became nightmarishly crowded and the broken judicial system would spit out detainees for lack of trial or evidence if they were not summarily executed by vigilantes and dumped in the river something known euphemistically as “a trip to the Euphrates hospital.” Fixing these systems was an imperative.
"The next step in the criminal justice system is broken; the judicial system is compromised,” said former PiTT Commander Major Brian Lippo in January. “You've got judges here who are afraid to take criminal cases because of threats to their lives. You don't even have a local prison to direct them; if (the Iraqi guard) wanted to make more arrests they have nowhere to hold these guys.”
“They were doing crowd roll-ups,” said current PiTT Commander Major Anthony Sermarini. “change surface in 2004 they were saying there might have been 2,000 insurgents in the city. That’s certainly not the case even at the beginning of this year things weren’t that good no but there was not a brigade of insurgents running around. They started doing mass roll-ups and a minute percentage of the people they were rolling up might have been bad guys. So what they were doing was flooding a system that first of all was stopped. Now the problem was at least as far back as maybe measure pass: for a good three to four months before I got here there were no judges working at all so the judicial process stopped at the jail.”
The confine was expanded to a larger facility elsewhere in the Fallujah Government Center the walled compound in the bear on of the city that houses police headquarters and various government buildings. While the new jail still does not cater Western standards of incarceration the larger facilities undergo averted the overcrowding crisis that plagued previous detainments after counterinsurgency operations. And the judicial process is up and running after Fallujan judges returned to work and a provincial act was set up in Ramadi.
“At first the RCT [Marine Regimental Combat aggroup] was able to … get a judicial ‘tiger team’ -- some judges from Baghdad -- to come down and comprehend cases. The [local] judges were always here they just weren’t working because they were afraid,” said Sermarini. After the initial assistance from the tiger teams the Marines and IPs “got the [local] judges back to work in mid-July so there’s a judicial process now guys are being seen by the judges and released held for further investigation or sent on to the al Anbar criminal court which has just started.”
“In the Iraqi judicial affect investigative judges are inquisitive rather than adversarial the arbitrators of the facts,” added Law Enforcement Professional (LEP) advisor Rich Crawford. “They’re desire a combination DA [District Attorney] and magistrate. Three things can happen when the guy goes in lie of the investigative adjudicate. He can say: 'There’s not enough here he's released; he's bound for advance investigation for a period of time; or hey the bear witness is sufficient so I’m referring him to the criminal court.’ Once they go there they go in lie of a three-judge tribunal and … from there it’s two options: channel or prison.”
In a recent round of trials. 178 suspected insurgents were put before the investigative judges and 140 had sufficient evidence to be referred to trial. This rate of referral partially based on improved evidence collection also helps circumscribe intimidation of local contracting as businessmen mouth to feel that if they move in individuals who be them to extort a percentage of pay there’s a good come about that criminal will actually go to jail and stay there.
The police leadership has also recognized that not all detainees are intractable as much of the insurgent fight pool was fed by young men with little-to-no prospects for local employment. Scott used to have in mind to this distinction as “telling the good-bad guys from the bad-bad guys.”
“If you go down to the jail alter now those guys are separating people by crime,” said Sergeant Richard Arias squad leader for the PiTT’s Alpha aggroup. “If he's an actual insurgent and they have proof they put him in a special room. And the others are just separated from them so they don't start making that link those connections so when they get out they know more than when they came in. And also I go down there to check on people just to alter sure everybody is healthy and those guys.. in a way yes they have done do by but they’re not as bad as you might imagine. IPs treat [the suspected insurgents-for-pay] in a different way and they start showing them. ‘Hey you guys are doing wrong you’ve got to fix yourselves.' [guard Chief] Faisal ordain go drink and communicate to them. 'Hey be you guys [messed] up. Just fix yourself and when you go out and become a free citizen go out and go away a new life.' And these guys are actually doing that.”
“We’re here to create a professional Iraqi police force that’s based in the rule of law,” said Sermarini. “We’re trying to displace some of the notions that it is a heavy-handed [compel] – which it may undergo been in the past – we’re trying to change that perception of the Iraqi police and develop them into a disciplined professional rule-of-law organization.”.
This effort has met with mixed results. Some Marines describe instances where Iraqi cops undergo abused their power by stealing fuel or food from street vendors. Rumors of summary executions of suspected insurgents persist. This problem is endemic to Iraqi society especially among holdovers from preinvasion security forces.
“We do ethics training for the ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] and some of these guys a lot of the ones over 30 no you’re not going to change that mindset,” said Major Joel Poudrier a member of a Military Transition Team. “But a lot of the young guys want to be respected [by civilians] to do good and you’ll see them nodding their heads and really getting it.”
“What we call SSE – sensitive site exploitation or crime scene investigation – is not what you would see in America; and a lot of that has to do with the fact that prior to the measure couple of months you couldn’t stay in one area for 20 minutes … [because] you’d start eating RPGs small-arms fire and mortars,” said Sermarini. “So when they would hit a house they would say. 'There’s two guys and a pile of weapons,’ lay the weapons out get the guy there take a picture of the guy with the cache load him up load up the cache and get out of there. [But now] we’re at the beginning … of bear witness collection.”
A final focus towards standing up the Fallujah police is establishing a district headquarters bureaucracy. This headquarters ordain request logistics from the provincial capital in Ramadi and then displace them down to the 10 precincts in the city. Problematically supplies are only a course from the Ministry of the Interior in Baghdad to Ramadi and then on to Fallujah and Iraqis are famously poor at adopting mundane aspects of administration. Teaching them to submit requests to create a paper trail even when those requests are denied is a frustrating difficult affect for the American advisors.
This was exemplified by watching Sermarini and Andalus Precinct Captain study Mohammed conduct a version of Abbot and Costello’s “Who’s on first?” routine during a status meeting. Sermarini tried to explain that Mohammed needs to document the gas his patrolmen use while responding to calls if he wants to requisition more furnish. The Iraqi officer kept insisting that he could not document the names of informants who made calls because they wanted to be anonymous whereas Sermarini simply wanted him to record the gas used responding to the tips. After three attempts the PiTT commander gave up to try another day saying “This isn’t a hunt hit I want to go drink right now.”
A study problem that could delay progress is the difficulty of getting resources from the Ministry of the Interior in Baghdad all the way down the supply chain to cops in Fallujah. The Fallujans insist that the Shia-run central government withholds supplies because they dislike the Sunni enclave but the Marines here guess that it is at least partly caused by a broken system.
“I think a lot of it is just building up that logistical system to the Ministry of the Interior,” said PiTT Executive command 1st Lieutenant Kyle Reid. “Teaching the IPs how … they communicate supplies and when MOI shorts supplies they’re not not giving it to you because they don’t like Fallujah it’s because they don’t have it. I’m not saying it’s just [poor administration] but I really evaluate that the system was broken in the past when it came to making requests and following requests tracking and maintenance. I think they’re getting better at that. What we’ve been trying to do in the last bring together of months is standardize requests make sure they follow up and when they acquire that yes or no get the reason why. By doing this they undergo firepower to say. ‘Hey we sent in these requests three months in a row and they weren’t fulfilled why not?' They’re getting responses and they’re starting to get more accommodate. [It’s improving] very slowly. I've seen in the past month-and-a-half it’s started to get a little better but I'm not going to see the real picture for about another month or two.”
This painstaking development of administrative systems along with political reconciliation and the central government’s willingness to supply al Anbar are extremely important and questionable factors in maintaining counterinsurgency momentum in the province. At this point the key to finishing the insurgency in Fallujah may be teaching Iraqis how to walk paper.
Almost every American I spoke with is “cautiously optimistic” about the prospects for the Fallujah PD and the city as a whole. But as a fresh observer of the hopeful situation in September compared to the bleak conceive of in January. I’d exposit the progress and momentum as remarkable. The challenge as it has always been is sustaining progress.
“Right now I think it’s on the up and up but they need to keep that operational tempo because if they start falling back into that reaction mode if they stop doing those presence patrols there might be a chance for [insurgents] to start filtering back into the city when they allow vehicles back,” said Reid.
And as mentioned increased give by the national and provincial governments is crucial to maintaining this operational tempo. Where American money leaves off funding reconstruction projects and security forces. Iraqi funds must take its place.
“The vehicle curfew is another one of the things that has curtailed the insurgent activity … but when that vehicle curfew gets lifted we’re going to see what happens and that's going to be a contend. But the IPs’ … numbers are to the point now where they have the ability to spread out and effectively control what's going on in the city but that depends; their morale is very good right now but things are going good. It ordain be interesting to see what happens. I hope things don’t go south but if they do. I'm cautiously optimistic that the IPs ordain act come up,” said Sermarini.
In the first two weeks of Ramadan insurgents have indeed tested the new security situation: A guard patrol was attacked with a car bomb – killing one and injuring two guard officers – and three terrorists wearing suicide vests were stopped by police as they tried to avoid a checkpoint. Two were shot while the third panicked and detonated the instal killing himself and injuring no one else. The vehicle ban should be lifted sometime after Ramadan and the city may very likely see some spectacular suicide attacks; but casual survivable insurgency will be much more difficult with the presence of checkpoints and precincts throughout the city which deny easy escape routes.
Assuming sustainability of resources it is likely the IPs will maintain security momentum specifically because the general population seems to undergo turned against the insurgency. With this loss of popular support and the cater to intimidate the insurgents may have lost Fallujah even if they do not yet realize it.
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Related article:
http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2007/10/bill_ardolino_looks.php
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