Can the Iraqis police Iraq?

SAMANTHA APPELTON FOR TIME/AURORA
Members of the Iraq Civilian Defense Corps prepare to leave on a mission

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"If they want to see a change, they should let us operate by the old laws of the police," says Lieut. Marwan Hussein, at the Thawra police station in the heart of Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood. Relying on untested allies also presents risks for coalition forces. It is instructive to spend a night with the 82nd Airborne's Alpha Company, 3rd Battalion, 2nd Brigade, bivouacked in southern Baghdad. An Iraqi informant reports that 12 to 20 suspected resistance leaders from Afghanistan and Syria are meeting in a mosque near the airport. The unit's commander, Captain Tyson Voelkel, tells his men these foreigners are gathering to review plans to launch terror attacks starting the next day. Some 110 G.I.s plus 40 members of the new Iraqi Civilian Defense Corps training with Alpha Company move in to seal off the area. "I hope we get some of these guys," says Voelkel. The grunts under his command are less gung-ho. "I hope no one's there," says Specialist Todd Herwood as the convoy rolls forward. "Raiding a mosque? These things just give Iraqis an excuse to get angry."

That may well have been the plan. An hour later Voelkel aborts the raid after the Iraqi informer fails to show up at a designated rendezvous and an intelligence source inside the mosque says no Afghans or Syrians are present. Instead, the mosque is filled with Ramadan worshippers and, the source suspects, a television crew waiting to film the raid. "It would have been really bad," says Voelkel, if "we were seen going in with (bomb-sniffing) dogs while 200 people were praying."

The enemy in Iraq is hidden within the population, so good intelligence is essential to combat the insurgency. Major General Raymond Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, last week said the accuracy of information the U.S. was receiving was up over the past few months from 45% to 90%. But that's not Alpha Company's experience. Its intelligence officers say the enemy has become more elusive and shadowy, especially in the dangerous Sunni triangle around Baghdad, where locals are especially reluctant to help the U.S. "Most of the stuff we go out to find turns out to be dry holes," says Private First Class Mike Sifter. "We're told there's a bomb somewhere, and all we find is one machine-gun magazine."

The Army's intelligence gathering in Iraq is bitingly criticized in a recently completed report by the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kans. According to the report, computers needed to relay time-critical information from Iraqi agents to U.S. troops were not connected, so intelligence the spies gleaned didn't generate follow-up raids by G.I.s. Most of the military-intelligence officials were junior officers with no formal training, the paper complained. What's more, the interpreters they relied on were "middle-age convenience-store workers and cab drivers" whose Arabic was only good enough "to tell the difference between a burro and a burrito." So it was hardly surprising that a whiff of desperation hung over the Administration as it tried to assign blame for the 48 harrowing hours of bombing in Baghdad. Some officials continued to insist that most of the insurgents were Saddam loyalists. Others said the sophistication of four nearly simultaneous attacks indicated the work of foreign fightersIslamic radicals from outside Iraq, perhaps representing al-Qaeda or the related terrorist group Ansar al-Islam. Several Administration officials told TIME that Hizballah, the Lebanese Shi'ite militia, is becoming more active in Iraq.

Pentagon officials leaked word that captured insurgents had claimed that Iraqi General Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, a Saddam intimate who is No. 6 on the U.S. most-wanted list, was the main commander of Baathist hit squads. Some U.S. officials told reporters Saddam himself could be directing the attacksthough they had no hard evidence. That speculation was startling for an Administration that has long insisted, as Bush put it in July, that Saddam was "no longer a threat to the U.S., because we removed him." For months, Bush aides have dismissed criticism of the failure to capture the elusive dictator, claiming he was too busy trying to save himself to cause trouble. A number of intelligence officials in the U.S. and Iraq who have reviewed summaries of communications intercepts and agent reports told TIME these theoriesabout foreign fighters, Izzat Ibrahim and Saddamare based on supposition more than evidence. A man with a Syrian passport who tried to carry out a fifth car bombing last week was captured. Iraqis insist it is not in the psychology of their compatriots to engage in suicide attacks.