FALLUJAH: The 22-year-old police officer wraps a black scarf around his face when on patrol. He sleeps in the station and sees his new bride only a few hours a month. He watches his colleagues get shot and blown to pieces and wonders if he will be next.
''I have to wear a mask because I'm from the city. When I do my duty the guerrillas can recognise me,'' said the officer, Kalid, who said having his last name appear in print would put his life in danger. ''If they find out who I am, they will kill me within the hour. I hope they don't do it in front of my wife. I hope they don't make her watch.''Almost every profession is dangerous in today's Iraq, but few more so than police officer. US troops are training and equipping the Iraqi army and local police forces across the country in hopes they will one day be able to keep the streets safe on their own.
Hundreds of police have been killed during those efforts, however, especially in al-Anbar, a western, overwhelmingly Sunni Arab province roughly the size of North Carolina that's home to 1.4 million and choked with insurgents battling 20,000 US Marines spread thinly throughout the region.
Fallujah is in the heart of Anbar and has a history of bloody struggle against foreign armies dating back to the days of Alexander the Great. The city was a stronghold for insurgents until November 2004, when US forces stormed it, triggering the bloodiest urban combat of the war. Despite American efforts to maintain order, things here are starting to heat up again, with gunbattles, roadside bombs and snipers killing scores of Marines.
Insurgents who cannot get to US forces often slaughter police instead. Officers here have been shot while they prayed in mosques, killed by grenades lobbed into their living rooms, tortured and dumped in riverbeds and obliterated by roadside bombs that tore apart their pickup trucks.Last month, 18 police officers in Fallujah and on its outskirts were killed. That number was down from the summer when 30 officers-- an average of one every day-- were slain.
''I'm a cop in Philly but being a cop in Fallujah isn't like being a cop in Philly,'' said Maj Brian Lippo, a Marine reservist who heads a police transition team assigned to the city. ''These guys aren't doing accident reports or domestic violence calls. They are hunted.''
Made up almost entirely of locals, Lippo said the force has about 600 officers report for duty daily. Despite US efforts, those numbers have been slow to increase because between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of those who graduate from police academies in Jordan and other places desert during their first few months back in Fallujah, he said.
Those who flee so quickly have raised fears that they only joined to get a gun, uniform and police ID card, which then can help them facilitate killings and kidnappings for insurgents. Lippo said the US military believes Al Qaida buys police pistols for as much as $700 apiece.
That's big money for the average officer, who takes home $500 per month.
Kalid, the officer who didn't want his full name published, said Fallujah residents continue to sign up to be police not because of ties to insurgents but because there's few other ways to make a living since the start of the war.
He said most who flee the service after a short period do so because they can't take the constant fear of being killed.
''We've lost too many officers,'' said Kalid, who married five months ago but said it's too dangerous to see his wife more than for one or two hours at a time, twice a month.—AP
