BAGHDAD, June 20 (UPI) -- Iraq's new security services remain heavily infiltrated by insurgent agents, senior Baghdad officials admit to Newsweek magazine.
Iraqi's Sunni insurgents' still enjoy a vast network of infiltrators, spies and recruiters, Newsweek reported Monday.
Intelligence officials in Baghdad told Newsweek that Iraq's security services have hundreds of "ghost soldiers"-members who vanish, sometimes for months on end, but continue to draw their pay. The fear is that they are working for the insurgency while keeping up their ties in uniform.
As pressure grew to build significant Iraqi forces fast, some doubtful characters seem to have slipped through the cracks, the magazine said. Gaps in the process were quickly exploited in a strategic campaign of infiltration by the insurgency, it said.
Some 176 Iraqi police officers were found to have terrorist connections in the past two weeks, Newsweek said. "(Some of) their fingerprints were found on bomb debris examined by specialists," one official told the magazine.
Iraq's Security Minister Abdul Karim al-Inizi told Newsweek the ones who got caught were only a fraction of the total number of infiltrators.
