Ethnic and religious balance in Iraqi police and security forces of the Iraqi Ministry of Defence and Iraqi Ministry of the Interior.

I subscribe to Hansard - the official report of proceedings in the British Parliament. I got this little gem in my inbox. Nick Harvey: To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what assessment he has made of the degree of ethnic and religious balance in Iraqi (a) police and (b) security forces of the (i) Ministry of Defence and (ii) Ministry of the Interior. [61850] John Reid (British Secretary of State for Defence): In the Iraqi police service, which is provincial in structure, there is no formal system with which to track demographics. In the army, which recruits nationally, we estimate that six of the 10 divisions are overwhelmingly Arab, reflecting the ethnic mix in the areas from which they recruit, and of the remaining four, three are majority Kurdish. In the Iraqi Ministry of Defence, as at 1 April 2006, the distribution of senior posts is as follows: Sunni Arab (Number & Percentage) Number 15, Percentage 26. Shia Arab (Number & Percentage) Number 38 , Percentage 66. Kurdish (Number & Percentage) Number 4, Percentage 7. Turkoman (Number & Percentage) Number 1, Percentage 1. Total (Number) 58 ( Percentage) 100 Comparable information is not held for the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. Notes: Emphasis added by me. In the original report the statistics given above are presented as a table. I have instead used a definition list to minimise blogger's occasionally somewhat eccentric way of displaying tabular data. Source: Hansard.