Looking The Other Way

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The experience of the troops assigned to Mekanik, a mixed neighborhood that is home to both the powerful Shi'ite Mahdi Army and a Sunni militant group called the Omar Brigade, illustrates the U.S.'s dilemmas. The neighborhood had suffered months of killing between Sunnis and Shi'ites before U.S. forces found a solution: to make the murders stop, keep the cops, who were overwhelmingly Shi'ite, out. Lieut. Colonel Jeffrey Peterson, the U.S. troop commander for Mekanik, says, "Whenever we would talk to locals about [the violence], they always implicated the national police as starting it. I could never prove it. But the bottom line was--whether it was true or false--the people did not trust the national police." In early October the Americans created what they called an isolation zone, ordering all police out of Mekanik. Before the U.S. cordon went into effect, there had been up to eight murders a day in the district of 50,000 inhabitants, and Sunni mosques were frequently attacked by Shi'ite gunmen. The Army says that as soon as the police left, Mekanik's murder rate dropped about 60%, and the mosque attacks stopped altogether.

The question now is whether the U.S. can rebuild a force that is trusted enough to take back responsibility for the neighborhood. U.S. troops who work with Iraqi security forces sometimes investigate and even arrest Iraqi police. The Pentagon points out that Iraq's Interior Ministry has fired or suspended roughly 3,000 officers for offenses ranging from corruption to "breaking the law." But a senior official at the ministry who spoke to TIME on the condition of anonymity says the dismissals were little more than a charade. Police officers who quit for their own reasons accounted for about 500 of the supposed dismissals, he says. Most of the others the ministry let go were employees with medical problems or nearing retirement. Virtually nothing had been done to remove ministry officials implicated in abuses ranging from mistreatment of detainees to working with death squads.

That leaves the job of cajoling good behavior from Iraqi police largely in the hands of junior officers like Grim, 28. The square-jawed West Point grad from Orange Park, Fla., is on his second tour in Iraq. He says his job is something equivalent to "armed social work." He feels responsible not just for making arrests and advising Iraqi soldiers but also for protecting the civilians of Mekanik. So while he says he trusts most of the officers, it's clear that he lives uneasily with the possibility that at least some of the Iraqis may be accomplices to murder when he's not around.

The raid with Hashim--the first such joint operation since Iraqi police were allowed back into the district--was typically disquieting. The house, it turns out, was empty. Grim and the other U.S. soldiers walked away uncertain about what had happened. It could have been an honest mistake, but the Americans couldn't help wondering whether Hashim was really looking for "terrorists," as he claimed. Maybe he was looking for a Sunni family to rough up, Grim says. Or perhaps the raid was just a diversion to keep U.S. troops busy while crimes were committed elsewhere in the neighborhood.