December 25, 2003	Thursday	Ziqa’ad 1, 1424

BAGHDAD: If Iraqi policeman Raid al-Qaisi ever forgets about occupational hazards, he only has to glance at the bloody handprint on his office wall.

“I’m terrified coming in here every day,” said Qaisi, a lieutenant at Baghdad’s al-Doura police station, one of several hit in a flurry of bombings one day in late October that killed at least 35 people, eight of them police.

Since then at least eight police stations have been bombed, making officers — tainted in the eyes of many by their place in Saddam Hussein’s rule of fear and their ties now to Iraq’s US occupiers — a target of choice in what they and US officials consider the vengeance of the ousted strongman’s followers.

Police are a pillar of a US political exit strategy from Iraq that hinges on strengthening local control of security, a task they say they were never free to tackle under the scrutiny of Saddam’s agents in their ranks.

“There was never any real role for the police before the fall of the regime,” said Lieutenant Ammar Salman. “Now that we could have one, we are getting blown up and assassinated.”

While many Iraqis complain that the police, now as before Saddam’s fall, are corrupt and incapable of protecting them, they take a strange pride in their status as targets, regarding it as proof that they are more than an adjunct of US occupation.—Reuters