WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 (UPI) -- Iraqi officials rejected calls from an independent U.S. commission to disband a national police force infiltrated by Shiite militias, saying it had been purged.
“No. Absolutely not,” Iraq’s national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, told CNN Sunday, when asked whether the Baghdad government would accept the recommendation of the Jones Commission -- a panel charged by Congress with evaluating progress in standing up Iraq’s new security institutions.
The commission said that the Iraqi National Police, which unlike the country’s regular police force is directly controlled by the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry, should be disbanded and reorganized.
The commission’s chairman, retired Marine Corps Gen. James Jones, told the Senate last week the force was seen as “overly sectarian … heavy handed in their mission execution, (and) not trusted by people of other ethnic origins.”
But al-Rubaie told CNN, “The national police is doing a very, very good job.”
While he acknowledged, “There are some problems, there are some infiltrations from the militias, from political parties," he maintained that “we are doing a reform of this. And we are very aggressive in our reform.”
He said 19,000 employees of the Interior Ministry had already been fired, and another 9,000 were being considered for termination.
But speaking to reporters Sunday in Baghdad, Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh put the number of sacked ministry employees at 14,000.
