Iraq Removes Leaders of Special Police

[ECH1969]

The Iraqi government removed the country’s two most senior police commanders from their posts on Tuesday, in the first broad move against the top leadership of Iraq’s unruly special police forces.

The two generals had led Iraq’s special police commandos and its public order brigade, both widely criticized as being heavily infiltrated by Shiite militias.

The American military also applied pressure to militia networks on Tuesday. Iraqi and American troops arrested a senior aide to Moktada al-Sadr, an anti-American Shiite cleric. The aide, whom the military did not name but who was identified by a spokesman for Mr. Sadr, was arrested on suspicion of having directed kidnappings, killings and torture of Sunnis and Shiites, and of attacking Americans.

The two generals, Rasheed Fleyah and Mahdi Sabeh, both Shiites, had been in their posts since the previous government, under which abuses by largely Shiite police forces began. Iraq’s Sunnis deeply fear the police commandos that grew out of control soon after a coalition of Shiite parties came to power last year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/18/world/middleeast/18iraq.html?ref=middleeast