THIS is the front line of the war with Al-Qaeda. In other parts of Iraq their
fighters are like ghosts, using car bombs and remotely triggered mines to
deadly effect but rarely revealing themselves. In Diyala, Al-Qaeda troops
are seizing villages in house-to-house battles that have plunged the
province into an unacknowledged war.
Last week, about 200 Al-Qaeda fighters overran the neighbouring Shi’ite
village of Sufayet and refugees streamed into Dojama with terrible tales.
“An Al-Qaeda man shot my uncle in the street in front of our house,” said
10-year-old Abdullah Khaled, illustrating his point with his toy machinegun.
“Then a second one ran over him with a motorcycle. His head squished,” he
said. Other boys in the village scampered up and down the dirt streets in
mock gun battles. Everyone knew Al-Qaeda was close by.
“Al-Qaeda came at 5am,” said Shaema Muhammad, Abdullah’s mother. “They came to
our house because my husband was always talking about how we have to defeat
them. My husband escaped but they killed his brother and his cousin.”
Shaema, 35, and a neighbour ran with her seven children. They have taken
refuge in the home of Zuheir al-Janabi, the local sheikh, with only the
clothes on their backs. It is a fragile refuge – Dojama is mortared almost
daily.
As we talked, a white pickup truck pulled up with three men in the cab and a
thin woman huddled in the open back. Only her bright blue eyes were visible;
she was wearing the dress Al-Qaeda enforces, a dirty black abbaya robe and
black gloves. She was too shocked to speak much.
“Al-Qaeda came and they forced me and my husband to move,” she said. “Then
they shot my husband. I’ve nothing now.” She joined the 80 refugee families
Dojama is already supporting. Food is running low and no government rations
have arrived for six months.
Janabi, 50, dressed in a black robe with gold-braid trim and a white keffiyeh
headdress, climbed to the roof of his house and pointed across fallow
vegetable fields to the Al-Qaeda front line behind date palms about three
miles away. A mortar shell had just fallen and black smoke rose up above the
trees.
American forces patrol the main roads but do not come into the villages. Even
on the highways, the ferocity of the fighting is evident; huge craters left
by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the roadside bombs used by Al-Qaeda,
line the road.
Janabi and other local sheikhs have formed the Diyala Rescue Council, a
provincial militia to fight Al-Qaeda, but they desperately need help.
“Al-Qaeda came to Sufayet in pickup trucks,” said Omar Hamed Hamid, 25,
dressed in baggy wool trousers, a wool sweater and a camouflage vest. His
machinegun was slung over his shoulder.
“There were too many of them and my bullets ran out so I had to flee.”
Seventeen local US forces are advancing through Diyala, where the games
played by Abdullah Khaled and his friend, right, recreate the violence
around them fighters died before Sufayet fell to Al-Qaeda.
The fighters in Dojama and the villages around Khalis have begged the
Americans for weapons and ammunition but none has yet arrived. They went to
Baghdad to plead with the government of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister.
He promised to send soldiers, but for now they are fighting alone.
The Diyala militia is not so far part of the Concerned Local Citizens militias
– known as the Awakening movement in Iraq – which the Americans have used
with great success to defeat Al-Qaeda in Anbar province in the west and in
Baghdad, where violence has fallen dramatically.
Unlike the Awakening, which is made up mostly of former members of Al-Qaeda
and Sunni tribes who welcomed the extremist group until it started killing
those who would not adhere to its strict Islamic regime, Diyala’s sheikhs
are both Sunni and Shi’ite.
“We decided that both the Shi’ite and Sunni are suffering from Al-Qaeda,” said
Sheikh Ali Zuheiri, the local leader. “We needed to make one group together
to fight this evil. We are fighting for our homes.”
The 28 sheikhs – 15 Shi’ite and 13 Sunni – meet to make decisions together.
Zuheiri is Shi’ite; Janabi, Sunni. Their composition reflects the population
of the province, almost evenly divided between the two Islamic branches.
Shaema, a Shi’ite, has been given refuge with her family by Janabi even
though he is a Sunni. Shaema’s husband is Sunni and one of Janabi’s three
wives is also Shi’ite.
Although they are fighting together now, the religious divide in Diyala is the
reason Al-Qaeda initially made inroads into the province. When Saddam
Hussein was toppled in 2003, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution
in Iraq (SCIRI) sent its fighters in the Badr organisation from exile in
Iran across Diyala’s border. The Badr fighters started assassinating local
Sunnis, mainly former Ba’athists or Saddam’s officers.
When Al-Qaeda moved in, it was at first welcomed by the beleaguered Sunni as a
group of well-equipped, wealthy com-rades-in-arms. The Badr militia was
overwhelmed and fled, leaving poorly armed Shi’ite villages defenceless.
Many villagers pledged their allegiance to the more muscular Mahdi Army, the
militia loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, whose flags fly over village entrances
today.
The sheikhs of Diyala are trying to restore the damaged fabric of a mixed
province, where Shi’ite and Sunni rubbed along, if sometimes uneasily.
“Al-Qaeda came under the flag of religion,” said Zuheiri. “Some people were
brainwashed. This is not religion; these are criminals.”
He didn’t point out that across the date-palm front line, in the enemy ranks,
were some of the village’s Sunni sons. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is led by foreign
Arabs, but most of its foot soldiers are Iraqi.
When Al-Qaeda was chased out of Anbar and Baghdad last year, it regrouped in
Diyala and declared the province the Islamic State of Iraq, to be run as an
Islamic caliphate with Baquba as its capital.
Until earlier this year the province was entirely run by Al-Qaeda. Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, was killed just down the road in
Hibhib. The Americans finally retook Baquba in June.
Iraqis point out the dangers of leaving Diyala to Al-Qaeda: not only does it
border Iran, but five highways run directly into the Iraqi capital and are
used to smuggle in weapons.
Americans say they are well aware of the need to retake Diyala. Last month,
Major-General Mark Hertling, the northern commander, launched Operation Iron
Reaper to target Al-Qaeda there.
“We still have a hard fight,” Hertling said last week. “The rest of the
country has seen increasing stability. We have not seen that level of
decrease [in violence].”
As the US forces advance in Diyala, they have come across evidence of the
shocking brutality of the Al-Qaeda reign. On Thursday, Hertling revealed
that his troops had found a torture centre in a farm north of Muq-dadiya.
Chains hung from ceilings and walls, an iron bed was still attached to a car
battery to give electric shocks, and bloody knives and swords were left
behind by the torturers. Twenty-six bodies were found in a mass grave
nearby.
Al-Qaeda shows no sign of giving up easily, as the villagers of Dojama have
learnt. Last week a judge was shot and killed as he drove to work, and a
suicide bomber struck a cafe on the banks of the Diyala river, killing young
men drinking tea and elders playing backgammon.
Another suicide bomber blew himself up in Baquba among a group of men signing
up to join the local militia, killing 15, one of them an American soldier.
Dojama may have a long, lonely winter ahead.
Report on a torture
chamber found by Operation Iron Reaper in Diyala
