THE Iraqi Government sacked 3,000 police officers for human rights abuses, corruption and complicity with militias yesterday.

The drastic action came only a fortnight after the authorities laid off an entire police brigade for aiding death squads.

Washington is increasingly looking to the Iraqi Government to take more responsibility for the country’s security. Yet its writ barely extends beyond the blast walls of the green zone in central Baghdad, let alone on to the streets of the capital.

In the US-protected fortress, Iraq’s Government huddles, riven by sectarian splits and cut off from its terrified people. Inside their bubble ministers live in comparatively luxurious compounds, each sectarian bloc divided from the next by barricades. They are hard to reach by telephone. Some spend more time outside the country than in it.

After just four months in office, the administration of Nouri al-Maliki, the Shia Prime Minister, has become a virtual Government-in-exile in its own country.

Even the cautious optimism of Western diplomats who never set foot outside a highsecurity compound is being tested. “I don’t pretend there is effective Government all over Iraq. Is that a result of the security situation or low capacity inside the ministers? Well, a bit of both — but quite a lot of the latter,” one told The Times.

The chaos and bunker politics have led to increasingly extreme scenarios for Iraq’s future being floated.

A Sunni leader, Saleh Mutlaq, has toured the Middle East promoting the idea of a five-man junta to replace the Government with martial law — effectively a call to return to the old days of repression which has fed into rumours of an impending coup.

Insurgent groups have declared a breakaway Islamic state in central Iraq. Mr al- Maliki responded to the crisis by calling a reconciliation conference — and then cancelling it for “emergency reasons”.

At a checkpoint outside the Green Zone, graffiti reads “Long live General Moqtada”, referring to the anticoalition Shia cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, whose al-Mahdi Army militia — accused of running death squads — is the real force on many of Baghdad’s streets.

A three-month security crackdown in the capital involving 60,000 US and Iraqi troops, failed to quell the violence.

As part of the Government’s much-revised security plan, every police checkpoint is supposed to have Sunni and Shia officers on duty, as much to watch each other as to look out for terrorists.

The civil war crippling the capital is spilling into surrounding areas.

US and Iraqi forces have fought open battles with al-Mahdi Army in the Shia town of Diwaniyah, while a weekend of sectarian revenge killings left 91 people dead to the north in Balad.

Balad is in an area declared part of a six-province Islamic state, or Caliphate, centred around Baghdad, according to a statement by the Mujahidin Consultative Council, a group of Sunni militant organisations that includes al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The gloom among ordinary Iraqis, who feel dispossessed by a parliament that responds to each massacre with mutual recrimination, has deepened.

Mr al-Maliki constantly vows to disband militias but is himself guarded by them, and criticised a US Army raid on al-Mahdi Army stronghold of Sadr City in July.

Hojatoleslam al-Sadr has 32 deputies in the Government, and could pull out — smashing the façade of a political process — if his militia is singled out.

As a result, the US military censors any mention of al- Mahdi Army when talking to the media, insisting that it is only going after individual death squads.

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