Coalition of the Sort-of Willing Canada Iraq Police

With his oval glasses, lean frame and balding head, rcmp staff sergeant Paul Marsh doesn’t look like the type of man who would leave his wife and two daughters to teach Iraqi police cadets how to shoot people. Last year, the relentlessly polite Marsh, who says “heck” instead of “hell” and collects vintage Coke bottles, was manning a desk at the rcmp’s media-relations office in his native Ottawa. Now he is a small but important player in helping to secure Iraq and help with Canada’s diplomatic push to ease tense relations with Washington. His mission begins at sun-up when he drives to the eastern outskirts of Amman, Jordan, to the International Police Training Center. It can be a frightening forty-five minute drive—both the road conditions and the drivers in Jordan leave much to be desired—and sometimes it seems as if Marsh has lost his way, until a sprawling group of buildings comes into view on the barren desert. Built by the U.S. State Department at a cost of $100 million (US) and covering 4.5 square kilometres, the heavily fortified base is where Marsh and nineteen other Canadian police officers are helping to train 32,000 new Iraqi police officers who are being deployed to replace war-weary US soldiers—a key part of America’s exit strategy.

While relations with Washington quickly disintegrated in early 2004 when Prime Minister Jean Chrétien refused to send troops to invade Iraq, this program allows Paul Martin to assure the US president that Ottawa is pulling its weight. Canada is spending $10 million on the training (a slice of the $300 million it has committed toward rebuilding Iraq) and isn’t the only country with cops in the desert. There are sixteen countries involved. For the Canadians (from nine different forces, they constitute the fourth-largest contingent here), the task must feel daunting, sometimes even futile. The increasingly beleaguered Iraqi police force has become a prime target of the growing insurgency, and these cadets may not last long on their country’s dangerous streets. “I doubt most of these recruits will survive a year,” says BC rcmp officer David Strachan. “They’ll leave, do other things, or go back to being farmers. Some will join the insurgents or get killed.”

Mornings are cold in the desert, a rare familiarity for the Canadians as they walk to meetings behind a wisp of their own frosted breath. Sandstorms and poisonous snakes are an occasional hazard, but minor ones compared to a potential terrorist strike. Marsh’s day begins with the same cautious routine: he pulls up to the maze of concrete barricades in front of the base, shows his ID, and then waits as his car is searched top to bottom for explosives. In January, insurgents killed ten Iraqi police officers when they bombed a training academy near Baghdad, a grim reminder of why pulling the cadets out of the war zone to a boot camp in Jordan makes strategic sense.

Marsh usually makes it through security by 7:30 a.m. to join a group of fifty firearms instructors in a prefab, air-conditioned office. The Swedes are dressed in dark blue uniforms, Jordanians wear blue camouflage, Poles paramilitary grey, and the Canadians are outfitted in blue and grey. The Americans seem to dress as they please. It’s Monday morning and the men, rubbing the weekend out of their eyes, are eager to attack the fresh hummus and falafel laid out for them. Bob LaChausse, a retired officer from Roseville, California, wearing khakis and a baseball cap adorned with an American-flag pin, points to a falafel, elbows me and bellows: “You like those lamb nuts? ”

The centre’s 300 instructors have trained over 10,000 Iraqi officers since early 2004. But the rush to get able bodies into police uniforms and ship them back to Iraq means the screening process isn’t altogether effective. There are constant rumours that terrorists have infiltrated police forces in Iraq.

I asked Larry Bray, an officer from Florida, if he thought there might be insurgents hiding among the cadets here in Jordan. “Oh, we know we have infiltrators,” he said. “We know we have al Qaeda here.”

If terrorists can’t easily strike inside the base, they have no trouble attacking the new recruits once they are deployed. Last year, hundreds of officers were killed in Iraq, including five in Ramadi, west of Baghdad. As the killers videotaped and spectators watched, the police were lined up on the street in broad daylight with their hands bound behind their backs before being shot in the head. The same week, insurgents killed more than twenty policemen in attacks across the country. It’s no surprise that Iraqi officers are quitting the force by the thousand, almost as fast as new cadets are trained.

With so many of their peers dying, you would expect the atmosphere at the centre to be sombre, if not outright paranoid. But there is a strange disconnect between life at the base and the war 300 kilometres to the east. “For eight weeks, they are out of a war zone,” explains Toronto police officer Andrew Raney, who teaches defensive tactics to the recruits. Or, as his colleague Ottawa rcmp officer Jeff Charette says, “They get three hots and a cot, and they don’t get shot.”

The classrooms and shooting ranges are a short car ride from the morning meeting. As Marsh drives across the wind-whipped base to the range, in what is either habit or steadfast regard for the rules, he uses his turn signals—the only officer, as far as I can tell, to do so. On the way, we pass a group of cadets marching on the road. They have been at the centre for a month, and seem proud of their ramrod posture and identical blue uniforms and caps.

The one exception is a huge man tramping along in a pink sweatshirt and gym pants (extra-large uniforms being in short supply). Later, when Marsh is teaching the men how to wear a police belt, he chastises the big man in pink for wearing the gear improperly, but then realizes the man’s predicament. “Oh, you’re wearing sweatpants,” he says accommodatingly. “I’m sorry. Carry on.”