IT IS 9.30am in Baghdad and an explosion sends clouds of smoke billowing around the VIP convoy. The police escort rallies, secures its passenger and races off, all within 15 seconds, firing hundreds of machinegun rounds as cover.

As the green training flares disperse, applause ripples around the secret base for elite police units from the audience of fellow trainees, former SAS and Green Beret instructors, a three-star American general and an American senator.

At almost exactly the same moment in Baghdad, only 50 metres from the ramparts of the heavily guarded green zone, a nondescript Korean saloon car hurtles through a roadside barrier and smashes into Salihiya police station.

The terrified guards unleash a fusillade of bullets, but the suicide bomber crashes into their defences and blows himself up, killing at least three policemen and wounding 49.

There is no applause.

That — not the training exercise — is the reality of policing in Iraq and less than two months before Iraq’s elections some senior American military commanders have conceded that the country’s battered security forces are incapable of providing security for elections due on January 30.

The day before the Salihiya attack on Saturday, guerrillas overran another station in southern Baghdad, killing 16 police and freeing dozens of prisoners. Yesterday gunmen riddled a bus filled with Iraqis working for the US military in Tikrit, murdering 17.

General John Abizaid, the US commander for the Middle East, explaining the Pentagon’s recent decision to raise US troop levels by 12,000 to an unprecedented 150,000, said at the weekend: “While the Iraqi troops are larger in number than they used to be, those forces have to be seasoned more, trained more. So it’s necessary to bring more American forces.”

His concern was echoed by Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy, who said that it would be impossible to hold elections in Iraq if the security situation remains a “mess”.

Although some units, notably police commando and Iraqi special forces, have fought well in Fallujah and elsewhere, 3,000 of Mosul’s 4,200-strong police force fled without a fight when their stations came under attack from insurgents in the northern city last month.

Lieutenant-General David Petraeus was brought in during the summer to overhaul training of the Iraqi police and military. He is a wiry, seasoned Balkans veteran who impressed Iraqis and international observers alike when, as commander of the 101st Airborne Division, he quickly restored order to Mosul after US forces captured it last year. He toughened training in an effort to weed out poorly motivated infiltrators and those suffering from “tiny heart syndrome”.

He has also made it a priority to train elite, rapid-reaction units to stiffen the spine of other forces. These are among the balaclava-clad emergency-response, hostage-rescue, dignitary-protection and counter- terrorism units whose performance on the training ground charging through dummy doors and firing at man-size targets he has just proclaimed “absolutely mumtaz (excellent)”.

Despite the constant setbacks and attacks, General Petraeus insists that much of his programme in “on track”, but he sighs at the “immense disappointment” of the Mosul debacle last month, when dozens of police were murdered and guerrillas captured large quantities of weapons.

Asked by The Times whether the problem with the Iraqi security forces was cowardice, low morale, leadership, infiltration or intimidation, he conceded: “It’s probably all of the above.”

He added: “This is a rollercoaster that we are riding. You have to realise that every day there are going to be bumps, sometimes explosions, sometimes real plunges and the idea is to make darn sure you have got your eye on the horizon and you are still generally climbing with the rollercoaster over time. And I think that’s the case.”

He took heart from the way that the elite Iraqi police commandos who went up to Mosul after the disaster did such a “fantastic job” and “flat got after” the insurgents.

Yet even as he spoke on the training range, the Salihiya bomber struck. The Times’s Iraqi staff watched from 100 metres away as the blast hurled shrapnel and shattered windows all around them. As smoke billowed above the green zone, wounded police screamed for help while others, some with bloodstained uniforms, rushed on to the street, firing above civilian cars to clear the scene.

Drifting in and out of consciousness in hospital later, Mushtaq Taleb Ali, 29, said that he had joined the force only ten days earlier, with no training for the task ahead.

As he screamed in pain from a double fracture of the leg and with glass still embedded in his head, he said: “I saw the car crashing through the barbed wire. I knew straight away it was a car bomb and without even thinking I threw myself beneath a concrete barricade. I saw many dead and injured people lying around me. The Government didn’t do anything for us. They didn’t give us equipment to protect ourselves.”

Inside the green zone, American soldiers ran into the street, diverting The Times car to another entrance as it returned from the range.

“Another bomb,” the driver sighed, making a U-turn. “They are killing the police faster than we can train them.”

ART OF SELF-DEFENCE

• The Multinational Security Transition Command — Iraq is training 300,000 Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of Defence forces, to be in place by the end of 2005
  
  
• The Iraqi Army will consist of 27 battalions of infantry and three in transportation. The Iraqi National Guard will have 60 battalions
  
  
• The branches of the police include border units, an emergency response unit and special police commando battalions
  
  
• Since July 1, when sovereignty was transferred, equipment that has been distributed to Iraqi security forces includes 5,400 vehicles, 47 million rounds of ammunition, 42,000 AK47s, 68,000 pistols and 20,000 radios

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