BAGHDAD - The US-led campaign to subdue rebel-held areas in the Sunni Arab heartland has leaned heavily on Shiite troops amid a failure to attract the embittered Sunni minority into the Iraqi army and police.
Alarmed by the situation, Sunni religious leaders issued an edict Friday calling on the community, which dominated successive Iraqi governments before the US-led invasion of 2003, to join the security forces.
Iraqi and US commanders acknowledged to AFP in interviews that to subdue rebel areas they had been forced to deploy heavily Shiite forces in the Sunni triangle north and west of the capital.
The commanders defended the use of one community to police another as a default measure forced upon them by the failure of Sunnis to volunteer for the new post-Saddam Hussein security forces.
Until recently, US and Iraqi commanders insisted Iraqi forces were by and large an equal mix of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, with no one group dominating the ranks. That is no longer the case.
"You have to remember that the percentage of Shiites in this country is the majority anyway, so you will see more Shiites than anybody else," Iraqi armed forces chief of staff General Babaqir al-Zebari told AFP on Thursday.
Zebari pointed to Fallujah as an example.
After the massive November offensive to retake the Sunni city from insurgents, the force deployed in Fallujah was primarily Shiite.
"When we were holding peace talks with the Fallujah people in the old days, they were telling us: 'if you guys are going to come to this city, Shiites shouldn't come.' Right now we have nobody but the Shiites (in Fallujah)," Zebari said.
"In these areas (like Fallujah), we need forces. In their (Shiite) areas, we don't need forces. We will take forces where we need them to be ... These guys (the Shiites) wanted to fight."
US Marine Colonel Stewart Navarre spent the last six months overseeing the training of Iraqi security forces in Al-Anbar province, which includes Fallujah, and told AFP it had been virtually impossible to form a Sunni-based security force.
"At this stage of the insurgency in Anbar, local policing is exceptionally difficult. That's consistent with other insurgencies."
He blamed the collapse of Anbar's security force on a violent campaign by the insurgents.
"The intimidation and murder of police officers and the kidnapping of family members has been a regular feature of Anbar."
Any new police force that is formed in Anbar province will depend for some time on army battalions and elite interior ministry forces drafted in from outside and they are heavily Shiite, Navarre said.
"I would say on balance there is a fairly strong representation of Shiites. There is probably less of a representation of Sunnis ... We have strongly Shiite units moving into Anbar."
Navarre saw the present composition of the Iraqi security forces as a reflection of the Sunni Arab community's wider withdrawal from the mainstream since the invasion.
"Up until this point, the informal Sunni leadership has pulled back from the whole Iraqi transitional process," he said.
In Fallujah, the presence of Shiite troops in the onetime rebel bastion has stirred tensions with locals.
At the end of the US-led offensive last November, Iraqi troop vehicles were seen by AFP driving around neighborhoods with banners of the revered Shiite figure Hussein, considered a provocative act in the conservative Sunni city.
Navarre admitted some "friction" had surfaced between the Shiite-dominated Iraqi army units and locals.
"The Iraqi army has to be more sensitive and adjust its attitude to the situation. They've done a good job. They signed up to fight terrorists, not to do policing like we've asked them to do."
For now, Navarre sees no option but to bring in these largely Shiite army and interior ministry units from outside Anbar province to patrol Fallujah and nearby hot spots like the provincial capital Ramadi.
Currently there are 5,300 soldiers, interior ministry commandos and public order peronnel deployed in Anbar and the number will soon rise by another 2,500, including a special army brigade
By the end of the year, Navarre says an Iraqi army division will be brought in from Baghdad to help secure west of Ramadi all the way to the Syrian border.
The interior ministry is currently screening the 12,000 police on the rolls for Anbar province and plans to slash the force down to 6,000.
The police will gradually be reintroduced to Anbar's cities under the watchful eye of the Iraqi army and elite interior ministry units brought in from outside, Navarre said.
04/02/2005 12:57 GMT