From the Los Angeles Times

Iraqi policewomen once again armed

Ministry officials revoke an order for female officers to hand in weapons amid widespread objections. Also today, a car bomb in northern Baghdad kills 5.

By Tina Susman
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

7:36 AM PST, January 31, 2008

BAGHDAD -- Police officials said today they had rescinded an order requiring all policewomen to turn in their weapons that had angered women's activists and U.S. officials trying to bring females into the security forces.

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, which oversees police, said the order was revoked after objections were raised both within the ministry and from outside. A memo dated Jan. 17 said the ministry had "reconsidered" and "decided to return all the pistols" to the policewomen.

Col. Saddoun Abulollah said few policewomen had abided by the order in the first place, but that all who did had their weapons given back to them. He described their number as "a handful" of the roughly 1,000 women who have qualified as policewomen since U.S. forces introduced female recruitment efforts in late 2003.

Abulollah said the order came about because some policewomen were either giving their officially assigned Glock pistols to male relatives or selling them.

The order was quietly issued Nov. 14 without an announcement by the ministry, but it became public knowledge after a Los Angeles Times report. Female police officers interviewed at that time disputed the claim that women were misusing their weapons and said that by taking their guns away, the ministry was continuing an effort to force women into administrative jobs and deny them the same opportunities as men.

Maysoon Damluji, a member of Parliament and a leading women's activist in Iraq, took up the cause. That led the Parliament's Complaints Committee to write a letter to the Interior Ministry on Dec. 12 asking for an explanation of the order.

Despite the revocation of the original order, there is no guarantee the women will be able to overcome the hurdles facing them in the police force, said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. David Phillips, who has led the effort to recruit female officers. Phillips, who oversees the U.S. program to assist in training, equipping and developing the Iraqi police, had blamed the original order on the growing influence of religious conservatives in Iraq.

"In my two-plus years in Iraq, I have never seen any of the over 1,000-plus female Iraqi police performing law enforcement duty," he said today in an e-mail. "They are relegated to administrative roles and used as searchers of other females" entering government or other protected buildings.

Phillips has said that many of the women he recruited and guided through the police academy had come to him after being hired at the Interior Ministry, complaining that they were being prevented from working as police officers. Now, Phillips said he believes "only a portion" of the original female recruits still are employed at the ministry.

The ministry said it does not have the number because it does not categorize its police officers by gender.

Critics of the original move had noted that it came at a time of heightened threats from female suicide bombers, who normally would be searched by female officers but who could pass through checkpoints undetected if there were no women officers deployed to frisk them.

Also today, a car bomb blew up in northern Baghdad's Khadimiya neighborhood, killing at least five people and injuring several others, police said.

The blast went off at a bus terminal on the northern edge of the Shiite district. Police theorized that the bombers planned to explode the car in the center of Khadimiya but were deterred by checkpoints, so they left the vehicle at the terminal. Because the terminal already was closed for the afternoon, casualties were far lower than they might have been had the blast occurred earlier.