Check out our new Money Talks post on Vietnam

Currency News

Iraq to put Baghdad security forces under unified command

Iraq will bring its Baghdad security forces under a unified command in a bid to quash death squad activity, national security advisor Muwaffaq Rubaie told AFP.

He said as part of the plan the role of the Facility Protection Service (FPS), the 150,000-strong force providing security for infrastructure sites and ministries, will be reexamined.

"We are working on a new security plan that would help control the violence and the role of FPS needs to be revisited," Rubaie said.

Iraq's interior minister Bayan Al-Solagh has implicated the FPS in the wave of death squad killings that have ravaged the country in recent months and have been blamed on the Shiite-controlled government security forces.

"We need to revisit the issue of FPS, unify them under a single command and relook at their code of practice," Rubaie said.

Solagh told AFP Tuesday that there were about 200,000 security personnel not controlled by his ministry and that they needed to be put under a single authority, including the FPS.

Solagh said that most of the human rights abuses attributed to the police and the interior ministry in Iraq can be laid at the feet of the various security bodies belonging to other ministries.

"These forces are out of control. In total there are 200,000 not controlled by the MOI and MOD," he said referring to the interior and defense ministries.

"No one controls them, not even the prime minister."

In the case of the FPS, Solagh said their equipment is similar to that of the police.

"They have the same cars, the same weapons, the same uniforms as the police, just instead of 'IP' it is written 'FPS'," he said.

The FPS forces operate as independent entities under the control of the ministries they are assigned to guard, he explained.

Solagh added that he has already discussed the matter with prime minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki.

In the past few months, Iraq has seen a proliferation of corpses being found in Baghdad and its surrounding areas. They are thought to have died at the hands of death squads operating in cooperation with, or at least the tacit approval of, security forces.

Numerous stories of kidnappings and subsequent killings of Iraqis describe the attackers as wearing police uniforms.

Iraq's Sunni Arab politicians have accused the interior ministry of operating these squads to kill members of the minority community in the ongoing sectarian violence that has rocked the country.

On Wednesday, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said that in Baghdad alone sectarian violence claimed the lives of 1,091 people in the month of April.

Back to Top