Patrick Tucker
Technology Editor
Defense One
June 4, 2020
When armed contractors from Blackwater Security Consulting encountered an angry crowd at Baghdad’s Nisour Square, they wound up killing 17 people and injuring another 20. In part, they were the wrong team with the wrong training in the wrong place.
“These guys were part of a set of teams that took a heavy-handed…approach. They got into hundreds of firefights in that period, doing that kind of work,” said David Kilcullen, who served as chief strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the U.S. State Department in Iraq and as Gen. David Petraeus’ chief counterinsurgency advisor during the 2007-08 troop surge.
Kilcullen noted that another private security firm, Aegis Defence Services from the United Kingdom, “did hundreds of missions without getting into a single firefight. They had a completely different approach to working by, with, and through the population.”
The anecdote has at least one lesson relevant to the current crisis in police community relations in the United States: imported security forces who use heavy-handed tactics on local populations don’t quell civil discord; they make it worse.
Story Continues
Bugs Marlowe
Article URL : https://www.defenseone.com/politics/2020/06/what-iraq-war-can-teach-us-about-better-policing/165916/?oref=d-channelriver