Wanna know how Iraqi security forces are doing nowdays? Read, this buried NYT piece:
"It's clear that our expectations for them are way above their concept of duty and performance," said Lt. Col. Justin Gubler, commander of the First Battalion of the Army's 503rd Infantry, garrisoned at a camp called Combat Outpost near downtown Ramadi. "The Iraqi police are clearly intimidated to the point where they don't want to come to work."
Colonel Gubler said things had gotten so bad that when the Americans attacked Falluja, the Ramadi police were told not to come to work "just so we could differentiate them" from revenge-minded insurgents posing as police officers, he said. A sure way to know a car is packed with a suicide bomb, he added, is when the Iraqi police refuse to inspect the vehicle. "Somehow, they know."
The American troops get regular warnings about the Iraqi police before driving their armored Humvees into the dangerous streets of Ramadi. In the briefing for the mission to visit Al Farouk substation, for example, a young lieutenant told soldiers that it is "game on" if an Iraqi policeman pulls out a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. "If an IP shoots, we shoot back," he said.
Not that soldiers need the advice: one week ago an Iraqi policeman - or an impostor with a police uniform and car - wounded 15 troops riding in an open-backed seven-ton truck just outside the main gate of Combat Outpost. The bomber had been directing traffic at an intersection near the base for about 20 minutes, his police car parked nearby. After spying the truck, he hopped in and detonated his bomb.
From his experience, Colonel Gubler said, the Iraqi National Guardsmen in the region are only slightly better, though one Iraqi National Guard officer he knew stood out: the lieutenant colonel in charge of a national guard battalion near Falluja, 30 miles east of Ramadi. That commander, Colonel Gubler said, "was very good, but he was captured in Falluja and his head was cut off." He said he believed that the commander's subordinates had probably been complicit in the murder, committed in August.
