Iraqi police in the northern city of Mosul stood their ground during three attacks on their headquarters last week, a stark contrast from last fall when the same unit was routed by an insurgent offensive.
“They stood their ground, refused to abandon the police station that was damaged by a suicide car bomb, and increased patrols and checkpoints throughout the city to deter further attacks,” Army Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez, the top commander in northwestern Iraq, told reporters at the Pentagon via a teleconference yesterday.
The general’s account is a far cry from how U.S. officials assessed the same police force’s performance eight months ago. As Marines and Army soldiers waged a bloody battle to clear Fallujah of terrorists last November, the insurgents counterattacked by invading two police stations in Mosul.
Many police fled their posts in a fiasco that cast doubt on whether the Iraqi security forces could ever stand up to foreign terrorists and Iraq insurgents.
“They are defiantly standing up to the terrorists,” Gen. Rodriguez said. Iraqi police are backed by American forces and an Iraqi army brigade.
“They are executing those operations on their own right now and have been since March,” the general said.
A number of U.S. commanders in recent months have given similar glowing accounts of local Iraqi forces fighting — and sometimes dying — for a democratic Iraq.
But when pressed by lawmakers at public congressional hearings, they have refused, on grounds of secrecy, to provide unit-by-unit readiness assessments in a force that has grown to 160,000.
Some Democratic senators contend that only a small fraction of the force is combat ready. There is also the charge that the force is primarily made up of Shi’ite personnel, who use their newfound authority to harass Sunni communities. The minority Sunni Muslims ran Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein.
Gen. Rodriguez said the Iraqi police forces outside Mosul are operating near the Syrian border, trying to stop an influx of foreign fighters.
“We have been able to gather some significant information about how these foreign fighters flow into the country and we have taken steps and are executing operations throughout the depth of the battle space to decrease that flow,” he said.
He also said Iraqi citizens are informing on the location of hidden improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have killed hundreds of American and Iraqi troops.
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