ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Nineveh’s provincial council plans to recruit young people who are receiving social security benefits into the provinces’ police force, a senior member of the council told Rudaw on Saturday. "These individuals currently receive a monthly social security stipend of 250,000 dinars [about $167]. If they pass the evaluation committee, they will be integrated into the police force and their salary will increase to 500,000 dinars [about $335],” Mohammed Kakayi, head of the provincial council’s defense and security committee, told Rudaw. Recruits will need to pass rounds of assessments, including meeting age and physical fitness criteria, and then complete four years of training to become full members of the police force. This is part of a broader effort to increase the number of police officers in Nineveh as the federal government hands some security control back to the province. The interior ministry plans to transfer 1,200 federal police officers to the provincial force. In an earlier interview with Rudaw on Thursday, Kakayi said that the federal government intends to reassign the 25th federal police brigade, which consists of four battalions, to Nineveh’s police. Since the territorial defeat of the Islamic State (ISIS) in December 2017, security for Nineveh has been shared by the Iraqi army, the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), as well as police forces. There is also a presence of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the Yazidi town of Shingal in the northwest. It was in Mosul, the capital of Nineveh, that ISIS declared its so-called caliphate when the group seized control in 2014 after a brazen offensive. Remnants of the group, however, remain a threat, returning to earlier insurgency tactics of ambushing security forces, kidnapping and executing suspected informants, extorting money from vulnerable rural populations, and carrying out bombings.
