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By David I. McKeeby
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington – Coalition-trained Iraqi army and police forces in northern Iraq are on track to lead regional security operations by next year, says Major General Thomas Turner, commander of 101st Airborne Division and head of Multi-National Division North.
Speaking to reporters at the Defense Department via video teleconference from Tikrit, northwest of Baghdad, Iraq, May 5, Turner said coalition forces deployed to Iraq’s six northern provinces are focused on building an Iraqi security force capable of providing domestic order and denying safe haven to terrorists.
Turner’s area of operations includes Iraq’s borders with Syria, Turkey and Iran, as well as the northern city of Kirkuk, home to 40 percent of the country’s oil and 70 percent of its natural gas.
Coalition forces in the north are partnered with four divisions of the Iraqi army. The general reported that two of the divisions will be capable of taking responsibility for securing their assigned territories by the end of this summer, and the remaining units will be ready by early 2007.
As Iraqi forces take greater control in the region, Turner said, coalition forces would continue consolidating and turning military bases over to Iraqi forces.
Although all Iraqi units are “in the fight,” Turner acknowledged that some units remain in need of additional personnel, equipment and training. “The major inhibitor to independent operations is lack of equipment, manpower, their inability to sustain themselves [with food, fuel, ammunition, etc.] and a lack of systems or policies in place to manage the organization,” he said.
However, Turner predicted that this short-term issue should be resolved once Iraq’s new government selects a defense minister, whose function will be to ensure that Iraqi troops have the resources they need.
Turning to the Iraqi police forces, Turner said that the coalition has established police transition teams in all the major cities and provincial capitals of his area of operations. Those teams assess effectiveness of district and local law enforcement operations and provide training and technical support as needed.
Additional teams also are advising and training Iraqi border guards along the Syrian and Iranian borders, Turner said.
He also said that even though the region has seen some incidents of ethnosectarian tensions between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims and among Arabs, Kurds, Turkoman and Assyrian communities, Iraqi police are capable of keeping the peace. Terrorist attacks from al-Qaida in Iraq are a far more significant security threat to the region, he added.
“Foreign terrorists continue to make their way into the community, and there's a homegrown element of the organization,” Turner said. “The more success we have against al-Qaida, the more willing the Iraqi citizens are to report terrorist activity,” he added
“I think we are making great strides in the war against al-Qaida," he said. "As we take al-Qaida leaders off the street ... we do see an improvement in the security environment.”
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