Iraq's police force is not likely to be ready to take over responsibility for security in the country within a year, The Times reported on Tuesday citing unnamed American soldiers and officials in Baghdad.
The report comes a day after Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh said that nearly half of the country's provinces will be under Iraqi control by the end of this year, and a British official said at the weekend that Iraqi soldiers and police will be ready to take over security from coalition troops within a year.
"Iraqis are on their own timetable," an unidentified high-ranking American officer overseeing police training in the Iraqi capital told The Times.
"They are fighting a war, but I'm not always sure they are fighting it. We train them to do checkpoints, patrols, cordon and knock searches, but it fails in the execution.
"There's probably twenty of them at a checkpoint but you'll only see three actually working it," he said.
Meanwhile, another unnamed US officer told the newspaper that there was not enough time to train the security services, because they were needed to combat the insurgency in the country.
"It's a Catch-22 ... They've never been given the time actually to train. You just have a bunch of guys and get them to a checkpoint. It's on-the-job training," he said.
Another unidentified American official told the newspaper that it would be "very difficult" for the Iraqi security forces to take over in a year.
"The Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defence don't work together ... We in the military see it as one fight. I don't know what the Iraqis see it as. You could call it machismo, but it's all about power," the official said.
"That's a challenge that needs to be addressed."
British junior foreign minister Kim Howells said at the weekend that Iraqi soldiers and police should be ready to take over security from coalition troops within a year.