US cautious on Iraqi militias joining army

WASHINGTON, Apr 25: The United States believes that members of Iraqi militias should be allowed to join the US-trained Iraqi army only on an individual basis rather than in groups, a senior US official said.

Iraq's new Prime Minister-designate Jawad al-Maliki said last weekend that powerful sectarian militias should be disbanded and merged with Iraq's military. Such a move would be highly sensitive since the militias are each tied to different ethnic groups and political parties.

''It's a good proposal in principle but the devil is always in the details,'' the official yesterday said. ''How you integrate them is important. It must be focused on individuals and not units.'' The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he did not want to stir up controversy, said merging entire militia groups with the military could cause new problems.

''If it is done incorrectly then you will get infiltration and not integration,'' he said. ''Some of them (militia groups) are disciplined and some are not.'' The official said one example of an undisciplined militia was the Mahdi Army, which owes allegiance to radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and exerts considerable control in the Baghdad neighborhood known as Sadr City and elsewhere.

Some military analysts believe the US-trained Iraqi army and police are already largely made up of recruits whose chief allegiance is to their own ethnic group rather than the national government and the state.

Several militia groups, drawn along ethnic and religious lines, operate in Iraq, and US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has said they are killing more people than insurgents, often in execution-style murders.

Speaking to reporters en route to Greece, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said dealing with militias was an urgent priority but the formation of a new Iraqi government might open new ways to handle this challenge.

''In any case where you've had militias attached to political parties, it's not going to be an easy job,'' said Rice according to an official transcript.

Asked how the United States could help integrate the militias, she said Washington would continue to try to train a national army and police force that could make such armed groups redundant.

''The best thing we can do is to make sure that our training helps them to create truly national military forces and truly national police forces because that then takes away any sense that one needs militias to provide security.'' But military analyst Anthony Cordesman said there was no point merging highly polarized militias with US-trained military forces.

''It would be naive to the point of being dangerously stupid,'' said Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think-tank.

''These are scarcely people you want to integrate into a national force. This would simply create sectarian or ethnic forces or divisions within the forces that already exist,'' said Cordesman.

Reuters