Iraq’s new civilian administrator yesterday promised to bring thousands more military police into the country, and to step up patrols in an attempt to control widespread looting and lawlessness.
Paul Bremer (61) a former US diplomat who arrived in Iraq on Monday, admitted that security was a ”serious” issue and a top priority. ”We will continue to address it,” he said.
The number of US military police in Baghdad will be doubled to 4 000, and countrywide the number will rise from 7 000 to 13 000.
Bremer replaces Jay Garner, the retired US general who was first sent to run Iraq, and will report directly to Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary.
The change in staff and the decision to call in military police reinforcements are the first public indications that Washington realises that the security of postwar Iraq is slipping out of its control.
Sources at the office of reconstruction and humanitarian assistance, which is in effect running Iraq under Bremer, said US troops had now been told to begin more aggressive night patrols for the first time since the war ended more than a month ago.
The one-page rules of engagement issued to each soldier have not changed, but officers are now encouraged to take a more confrontational approach to enforcement.
Bremer said patrols in the past 48 hours had arrested 300 Iraqis. Many, he suggested, were among the tens of thousands of jailed criminals given amnesties by Saddam Hussein in the months before the war.
But Bremer will find it hard to fulfil his promises. As he was meeting the press at a conference centre yesterday, looters were setting fire to the already emptied ministry of information, barely three kilometres away.
A US tank and three military police Humvees parked outside the ministry, but the troops took no action as the looters ran through the building. Gunfire rings out across Baghdad every day, and buildings continue to be ransacked.
Despite the mounting anger from Baghdad’s residents at the collapse in security, Bremer tried to play down the problem. ”This is not a country in anarchy,” he said. ”People are going about their business and their lives. We are making progress every day.”
Bremer said he would ”aggressively move” to clear out senior Ba’ath officials from the new government, although he refused to say what form the new vetting would take. Already two police chiefs have been sacked, and the health minister was forced to quit, because of protests at their Ba’athist links.
Yesterday US forces arrested 260 Iraqis in a raid on a village near Tikrit. Most were later freed, but those detained included one who was on the US ”most wanted” list and five special security officers, including a general who had disguised himself as a shepherd.
Bremer is based in Saddam’s former Republican Palace, a sprawling and heavily guarded site on the west bank of the Tigris. Less than five minutes drive away, on the other side of the river, desperate looters were yesterday picking through the burned-out remains of the ministry of education and the ministry of higher education.
Most people were taking broken wooden doors and cabinets to sell for firewood. One man carried a large coffee table book about the Silk Route civilisations.
After days spent picking through government buildings, Rabba Hassan Ghani (24) had acquired a television set, a generator, several air conditioning units, compact discs and lamps. At the street market in Baghdad, he sold his haul for 1,25-m dinars (about £900).
”I wouldn’t normally do such a thing, but I need the money,” he said. ”If I’m not going to loot the building, then there will be another looter who takes everything. If there is no other looter, it will all go when the buildings are set on fire.”
Britain’s attempts to excuse its failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq descended into farce yesterday when the leader of the Commons, John Reid, dragged in the great train robber Ronnie Biggs.
Speaking after the government had admitted that hard evidence may never be found, Dr Reid said people should remember that nobody questioned Biggs’ guilt, even though the stolen money was never found. – Guardian Unlimited Â