Thursday, Dec 07, 2006
Opinion
Horrors of a closet civil war http://www.hindu.com/2006/12/07/stories/2006120707611100.htm
Jonathan Steele
Diyala has become a microcosm of Iraq's two inter-connecting wars.
[An Iraqi woman rushes her wounded child to a hospital in Baquba on November 25. - PHOTO: AFP]
DIYALA IS Iraq's province of death. No one knows how many people die violently there 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 the Americans, 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 November 28, as a warning to the whole community. A few days earlier 20 Kurds were killed. And on November 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 centre 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. U.S. helicopters were hovering all the time. We couldn't go out to buy food."
Enclaves
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 that people from other communities enter at their peril.
Take a wrong turning and you may discover a checkpoint where you could be ordered out of your car and shot. The Guardian reached it from Kurdistan in the north, the only route that offers a modicum of security.
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. -
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
Copyright © 2006, The Hindu.