Horrors of closet civil war played out in no man's land

Diyala is Iraq's province of death. No one knows how many people die violently here every week. Batches of bodies are dumped by the roadside almost every night. Many go missing, their corpses never found. Unlike Baghdad, where news of murder is widely reported, Diyala is part of Iraq's invisible war. Its horrors go unrecorded even though it has become a microcosm of the country's two inter-connecting wars–the battle between insurgents and US troops, and an increasingly virulent conflict between Sunnis and Shias. Ten bodies of Shias were dumped at the bus station in Baquba, the provincial capital, on Nov. 28, as a warning to the whole community. A few days earlier 20 Kurds were killed. On Nov. 29 the Iraqi army found 28 unidentified bodies in a mass grave just south of the town. The province's least dangerous towns are Khanaqin and Mandeli, two dusty places surrounded by semi-desert. Every day new refugees reach them with chilling stories. In a small building on Khanaqin's main street, a place advertising itself as a training center run by the Kurdish Women's Union, the receptionist described the escalating pattern of violence. Just arrived from Baquba and too afraid to give her name, she said: "People come in the night and write on the house wall, 'leave, you are Shia, you are unbelievers.' There was shelling, bombing, people slaughtered in front of our house. US helicopters were hovering all the time. We couldn't go out to buy food." With her father, the receptionist had fled Baquba a month ago. After renting a house and getting jobs they were planning to drive back to the city to bring her mother and two younger brothers and their furniture. "My mother rang yesterday. She said it was terrible. The terrorists blew up an American Humvee, and there has been shelling for several days. The Arabs are killing each other, just like in Baghdad. As Kurds we have nothing to do with it and try to stay clear." She was dreading the trip home, afraid of what could happen on the road. Her fears were understandable. Diyala has the feel of Bosnia in the early 1990s, a jumble of different enclaves which people from other communities enter at their peril. Take a wrong turn and you may discover a checkpoint where you could be ordered out of your car and shot. Diyala stretches from Baghdad's northern outskirts as far east as the border, like a belt across the country. It is not just its strategic position that makes it special. No group is in control. Sunni Arabs form the majority in Baquba but only half the province's population. So control of Diyala is contested, unlike the heavily Shia provinces of the south or the Sunni ones in the west. "Diyala is a little Iraq. We have Sunni and Shia Arabs, Kurds, and a small percentage of Turkomans. Everyone is trying to seize power," said Salah Khwekha, who heads the Khanaqin office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. "My colleague in Baquba was assassinated a month ago." Insurgents stormed Baquba's police headquarters on Nov. 29. The police fled and the building was burned down. US and Iraqi troops counter-attacked and fighting raged through the town, forcing government offices, banks, schools, shops, and the university to close. People hid in their homes, too terrified to go out. In a raid on a house outside the city on the same day the US military claimed to have killed eight al-Qaida militants, though they also admitted killing two female civilians. While they fight the insurgency Iraqi forces also seem to be involved in ethnic cleansing Balkans-style. The Iraqi army's Fifth Division, stationed in Diyala, is staffed largely by Shias. Major General Shakir Hulail Hussein al-Kaabi, the commander appointed by the Shia-led government in Baghdad, was recently accused by US officers of going exclusively after Sunnis, and detaining hundreds. At one point the soldier produced a list with the names of scores of Sunni politicians whom he planned to arrest. They included most of the local leadership with whom the US was trying to work, so the US side blocked the arrests. It was also alleged his troops operated death squads aimed at Sunnis. "I believe this is a larger plan to make Diyala a Shia province, rather than a Sunni province," Colonel Brian Jones, the outgoing commander of US troops in Diyala, told the New York Times. His suspicions reinforce the view that Iraq's escalating Shia-Sunni conflict is not just tit-for-tat revenge killing at the grassroots level, as most media reports imply, but a coordinated struggle for power that is inspired by the political leaders.