A Problem Province
Diyala province is a mess. A change in strategy in Washington may not be enough to make things right again
Months after pleas from the provincial council and American officials, the Ministry of the Interior says it is putting through transfer orders for Ghassan. Military officials here hope that this will boost their ongoing efforts to bring Sunnis into the police force. Already, they say, there have been signs of more interest in joining. But the damage Ghassan has done will be difficult to repair. "He has destroyed the Iraqi police. The situation isn't good," says Col. Ali Saadon, in charge of recruiting at the station. In the meantime, politicians are increasingly reliant on their personal security details-what amount to small armies of guards. Recently, the forces of rival politicians have clashed in "company-level firefights," say officials here-complete with rocket-propelled grenades.
Hopes. Today, Governor Ra'ad says the expectations of his electorate are simple: "The people look to me for three things: security, services, and a return to the normal routine they used to live." Yet he knows that these goals are still a world away.
After previously serving as a war planner in Iraq, Sutherland, the American brigade commander, has returned to a country in which the biggest changes, he says, have been the growth of al Qaeda in the region and the increasing influence of Iran. Diyala has become a key proving ground for al Qaeda at a time some Shiites see as "a chance to get back at Sunnis who have been living the good life all these years," says a military official here.
U.S. commanders add that it will take far more than troops to fix these dynamics, which are in turn fueling a vicious cycle of violence. "I have been most surprised by all of the jockeying-for political, economic, military power," says Sutherland. That jockeying, so endemic to the rest of the country, should now prompt some tough reassessment in Washington, officials here say, as soldiers on the ground ramp up efforts to transition security forces to Iraqi control. "Diyala was the place that we said we're going to turn over to the Iraqis-and look what happened," says a top U.S. commander. "We need to think a lot more closely about what conditions need to be set before transitioning control. If we don't, it can create more opportunities for the enemy," he adds, "which is essentially what happened in Diyala."
The provincial council members meeting with Sutherland stress that they will not return to the government until both Ghassan and Shakir are gone. They are also calling for immediate provincial elections. Until those things happen, they say, they are caught between the militias, and between terrorists "who want to return us to the Dark Ages." And with each day their frustration grows as they mull over the question posed to Sutherland by one Sunni sheik: "Is this the democracy," he wondered, "that the coalition promised us?"
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