WESTERN SKIES - October 4, 2005

*** FORT CARSON SOLDIERS WORK TO BUILD UP IRAQI DEFENSE FORCES ***

ERIC WHITNEY: Even as Fort Carson honored its fallen troops, about five thousand soldiers from the base's Third Armored Cavalry Regiment are currently serving in Iraq. They're tentatively scheduled to return from this tour in March. At present, a lot of them are training the Iraqi security forces that the Bush administration says must be functioning on their own before U.S. troops can pull out for good.

Last June, Pentagon officials gave the Senate a classified briefing on the progress of the Iraqi security forces. At the time, we contacted Fort Carson troops in Iraq, to get their assessment of how things are going. Major Gary Dangerfield, spokesman for Fort Carson's Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, said he was unable to arrange an interview at the time, as the Third ACR was very busy.

Last week, Major Dangerfield was able to arrange for an interview.

CPT. BRIAN WALLACE: Captain Brian Wallace, I am the regimental ISF coordinator, Iraqi Security Forces Coordinator. Basically on a daily basis I deal with all IA, IP that are located within Third ACR' s AO.

WHITNEY: IA and IP means Iraqi Police and Iraqi Army?

WALLACE: Correct, that is correct.

WHITNEY: The Third ACR's "AO," or Area of Operations, is primarily the city of Tall Afar, in northern Iraq, home to about two hundred thousand people. The regiment has just finished a major assault on the city and says that it restored security to the point that many of the thousands of residents who fled Tall Afar during the fighting are starting to come back.

Fort Carson solders are taking care of the majority of city's security needs, but Captain Wallace says they're also aggressively recruiting, training and working with Iraqi police.

WALLACE: With our Iraqi police, we partner them up with our actual troops in Third ACR, and we also have some State Department civilians working with them. Currently we have eight of those that go down into the town, and partner up with the police chief and they basically stand up their organization and administration, administrative functions within the station. And then we come in and help recruit the Iraqi police at the lower level and we send them off to the training. Right now, there's two training places that we have been sending the Iraqi police. And one of them is in Jordan and the other one is in Mosul. Right now we are getting ready to send two hundred and seventy-six newly recruited Iraqi police. And we just sent some current Iraqi police from Tall Afar, a hundred and fifty one of those, off to Mosul for a two-week what we call a refresher Iraqi police course. And then we've also sent three concurrent classes of Iraqi police that we had recruited that we sent off to Jordan. So we use all of these different facilities in order to get these Iraqi police out there, get them trained, and we bring them back into the city and integrate with the Iraqi army and with the coalition forces.

WHITNEY: Wallace says that in Tall Afar, the Third ACR just started building two new police stations, and has plans to build two more once they recruit enough police to staff them. About a hundred and thirty U.S. soldiers will be assigned to each station to work directly with the Iraqi police. Wallace says about thirty of those soldiers will join an equal number of Iraqi police from each station for regular patrols on foot and in vehicles.

WALLACE: We just got forty brand new vehicles, so they're out there patrolling in their new police cars as well. They have Nissan pickup trucks and Chevy Blazers. So that is helping tremendously as they go out on these patrols, especially with the small force that they have right now. In order to cover such a large area, with just over two hundred Iraqi police right now.

WHITNEY: Wallace says that the he expects the number of Iraqi police in Tall Afar to grow rapidly.

WALLACE: We recruited, like I said, within a five day period, two hundred and seventy-six people. Now that is after we just got done going through the restoring rights in Tall Afar, so the majority of the city had not even come back to Tall Afar yet. And so to receive those two hundred seventy-six people within that five day period was a goal that we had set out. Didn't know if we'd reach it, but we were able to get it with no problem. So we see a very positive attitude from the community to participate in the security of their own city. We actually had over six hundred people show up. It's just that a lot of the literacy is low, they have to be able to read and write Arabic, so that was a disqualifier for some. But because of the amount of people that actually showed up, that showed a positive attitude on the population to want to have security and actually a job within your city.

Our age group is nineteen to thirty-seven for initial hiring. And so we had a lot of younger males that wanted to become IPs, that weren't quite nineteen yet. So that was another major disqualifier. So I can see over time, we will have more and more people. And we're also developing programs in the city to teach the people how to read and write Arabic. The majority of them are Sunni Turkmen, and the Turkmen language is different than the Arabic so that's where they have the difficulty.

WHITNEY: Wallace says he expects the Iraqi police to recruit another two hundred and fifty officers for the training academy in Jordan in the next two to three weeks, towards a longer term goal of about fifteen hundred recruits. He calls that a reachable goal, and says it's not out of the question to eventually hire twenty-five hundred local police, although that will probably happen after the Third ACR returns to Fort Carson, which they expect to happen around this March.

WALLACE: I think the presence that we're setting right now within the city, and the help that we're giving them in establishing the recruiting process, we are setting the next group that comes in behind us up for success.

WHITNEY: Wallace acknowledges that keeping insurgents from infiltrating the police force is a concern.

WALLACE: It has been an issue in the past, and that is why we take the screening process very seriously. We have several intelligence people and what we call our screening personnel, that their specialized skill is part of the in-processing for the Iraqi police, is they have to go through a four-stage in-processing. And during that they get interviewed, and then we take their information and then we send it back to Mosul and they do an additional background check on each individual, before we send them off to police academy. Because they will be pulled if they do come up on some sort of black list or hot list as having criminal activity in their past.

WHITNEY: As far as when all the new recruits will constitute a force that's able to stand on its own without backing from U.S. soldiers, Wallace says he expects at least some of that capability to be in place by the time Fort Carson soldiers return to Colorado.

WALLACE: Well, actually, the two hundred plus Iraqi police that were brought in from Mosul, those IPs are actually are functioning on their own at their own stations. That's why we brought them in here to Tall Afar, to have them basically integrate with our new recruits to get them stood up and operating autonomously, on their own, quicker. Right now our biggest integration is between the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police, so that when they are out on the street that the citizens of Tall Afar, they see that the army and the police have a combined effort to provide security to the city. And I think in the short term, by the time we leave here that the Iraqi army and police will be doing patrols on their own in certain sections in the city. I think these guys can have their system in place and operate autonomously without us by the time we leave, in small sections of the city.

WHITNEY: Wallace says that the biggest challenge in getting the Iraqi police and army able to function on their own is logistical.

WALLACE: They have the initiative, they want to do it. Right now it's just the resources. It's more of the administrative pieces to a lot of the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police are just non-existent. And so that is one of the things that we're helping them out with. And it starts with coming all the way out of Baghdad, from the MOI, from the MOD (Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defense) and working its way down to the cities of Tall Afar, and Mosul and that is something that is coming along.

WHITNEY: Captain Brian Wallace is coordinator for Iraqi Security Forces for Fort Carson's Third Armored Cavalry Regiment. He spoke to us from Tall Afar, Iraq.

And that wraps up this edition of Western Skies. Stephen Raher is our associate producer, Delaney Utterback is the IT wrangler. I'm Eric Whitney. Thanks for listening.