US to Train Iraqi Police Volunteers in Hungary

The Pentagon, facing charges that it has too few US troops on the ground to bring security to Iraq, yesterday said it plans to send as many as 28,000 Iraqis on intensive police training courses at a makeshift academy in eastern Europe.

The rapid-fire plan, which would nearly double the size of the local police within 18 months, arrives as the Bush administration comes under domestic pressure to ease the burden on existing forces in Iraq, either by deploying additional US troops, or by persuading other countries to join a stabilisation force.

Yesterday, the death toll for US forces in Iraq rose to 138 - matching the number of troops killed when President George Bush declared an end to combat operations on May 1. Republicans leaders as well as Democrats now say that Washington needs to reconsider troop strengths.

So far, the Pentagon has resisted the idea of reinforcing the 146,000 American troops in Iraq, and the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, told reporters again yesterday that there was no need to send more US troops.

However, the Pentagon is anxious to share the burden of maintaining basic security. "Basically we want to have Iraqis policing Iraq," a Pentagon official said yesterday. "We are not going to be there forever."

The occupation administration also plans to train and recruit Iraqi border guards and customs officers.

The officer training courses are to be run from an old Soviet military base in Hungary, and the first batch of 1,500 recruits is due to arrive with the next few months.

"The Americans approached the government and asked if it would be possible to use the base for Iraqi police training. They said a formal request would be made if the [Hungarian] response was positive.

"The Hungarian government said yes to the unofficial request," a senior official in Budapest said yesterday.

The choice of the old Taszar air base was a natural for the Pentagon. In the run-up to the war, the site was renamed Camp Freedom, and amid much fanfare was intended to train 3,000 Iraqi exiles to help overthrow Saddam's regime. By late March, fewer than 200 Iraqis had gone through training. The Pentagon official said yesterday the facility had been upgraded.

However, Hungarian officials were doubtful that the base would be able to process 28,000 cadets, or that Budapest's involvement in such a controversial issue would be politically prudent.

In Budapest, officials said the American police training could be split among several countries, most probably the new Nato members of central Europe.

Few details were immediately available beyond those revealed to the New York Times, which reported the plan yesterday.

In an interview, Bernard Kerik, the former New York city police commissioner in charge of the Iraqi interior ministry, said the officer candidates would train under US supervision in Hungary for eight weeks, and then undergo four to six months of on-the-job instruction. He said the first group of 1,500 could begin training in four months, with a goal of increasing the size of the Iraqi police force to 65,000 in 18 months.