A Problem Province
Diyala province is a mess. A change in strategy in Washington may not be enough to make things right again
Following the clearing operation, Sutherland and Shakir, the Shiite general, meet with some 70 local Sunni sheiks from across the province, some from towns near the Iranian border. Many take the meeting as a chance to air complaints about the conduct of the police and Army. "The Army doesn't care about military orders," says one frustrated sheik. "They care about religious orders coming from Sadr. They are no better than hit squads."
As he speaks, several cars roll up a nearby gravel road, and the sheiks turn toward the commotion. It is just a food delivery for the kebab feast to follow the meeting, but this is a group ever wary of assassination attempts, and the sheiks are reflexively on guard.
The public relations push continues the next day, as U.S. forces urge General Shakir to go on Iraqi television and take part in a press conference, to put a local face on the clearing operation. But the result is, in the words of one U.S. military official, a disaster: General Shakir refuses to answer journalists' questions, saying he does not have authorization from the Ministry of Defense. Ra'ad Rashid al-Tamini, Diyala's governor, a fellow Shiite, is irate. "Today he embarrassed us," Ra'ad later tells Sutherland. "Ask him a simple question, and he should answer it." Sutherland brings Ra'ad a bowl of ice cream from the cafeteria at the government center and tries to reassure him. We'll take a video and show him what he looked like," Sutherland says. "We'll coach him."
Aches and pains. Yet despite the coaching, General Shakir continues to be a headache for U.S. forces. "I don't know whether he has a sectarian agenda, but he's definitely a buffoon," says one U.S. officer later that week, as some 180 detainees are brought into a local police station. It is, say Iraqi and American officials here, another mass roundup. As dozens of detainees sit blindfolded on the floor awaiting their hearings, an Iraqi judge sifts through the case files on his lap. He reads the first. "This one is dismissed," he says, turning to coalition forces in the room. "I've got an idea," he says. "The Iraqi Army goes into a raid, and they get one target they go for-not take some innocents."
Though none of this does much to help Sunni-Shiite relations in the province, the biggest overlooked threat to the area's fledgling government, according to officials here, has actually been the tenure of Ghassan, the Shiite police chief, who has been running his own militia. Last year, U.S. sources add, Ghassan put in a call for some 250 Shiite gunmen from Baghdad and promptly added them to his police rosters upon their arrival. "He said he was creating his own highway patrol," one senior U.S. military officer says. In reality, though, he says, it was Ghassan's "own personal hit squad" that set up checkpoints designed to intimidate local Sunnis. Coalition forces recently detained a group of Iraqi officers in his force who were holding citizens hostage, then selling them back for money. "Suddenly the whole force is bad in the eyes of the people because of his Shiite agenda," adds the officer.
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