Coalition of the Sort-of Willing Canada Iraq Police

The Western instructors find such fatalism maddening. As Grixbie Stephens points out, surrendering your fate to the stars sometimes means just plain surrendering. “Their hands were tied behind their backs and they were shot to death,” says Stephens about the assassination of twenty-one Iraqi police officers last November. “The reason for that is they gave up. The cadets don’t understand what fighting with your last breath means. They think there’s going to be some sort of mercy, some sort of leniency, and there’s not. If you are associated with the Americans, they’re going to hurt you.”

On January 10, the deputy police chief of Baghdad and his son were shot and killed outside their home. Not long after, the group of cadets I met at the Jordan centre graduated.

I tracked down Mohanned, who graduated from the centre in July, and was assigned to police his native Mosul, in Iraq. On the day I interviewed him, 3,000 of the 4,000-strong Iraqi Police Force in Mosul deserted their posts, with many of them, according to news reports, simply joining the insurgents.

“Our equipment is very poor compared to our rivals. We are having a very tough time resisting men with machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and rocket launchers. We’re visible targets,” Mohanned told me by phone, through a translator. The quality of the police training is very high, and the instructors are very professional, he said, “but eight weeks is not enough.”

Mohanned said it was love for his country, and the need for a job, that prompted him to train as a police officer. But like the thousands of others who have quit the police, he is no longer interested. “I do not feel secure for myself or my family,” he said. “When I see a man in a car, and that man is willing to explode himself, to die, what can I do? ”