Word: diyala
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...people were killed in Tuesday's explosions; 41 were killed outside the Egyptian and Iranian embassies and German ambassador's residence on April 4; 25 Iraqis were killed execution-style in a southern Baghdad village in the early morning of April 3; 59 were killed in two bombings in Diyala province on March 26, the day when results of the country's March 7 parliamentary elections were announced; and 40 were killed - including in two apartment bombings - on election day itself, which Bloom says had "no significant attacks." In the walk-up to the vote, 40 were killed...
Baqubah, the capital of Iraq's Diyala province, is a largely colorless place except for the winter orange harvest and the hundreds of campaign posters that line its streets. But at least the sectarian battles between Sunnis and Shi'ites that once raged through the city are now confined mostly to the ballot box as Baqubah, along with the rest of Iraq, prepares for national parliamentary elections on March 7. Inside the fortified government headquarters, Diyala's governor, Abdul-Nasser al-Mahdawi, is relatively optimistic that the elections - the fifth poll since the U.S. brought democracy to Iraq - will...
...though, al-Mahdwe, who belongs to a Sunni party that opposes Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shi'ite-led governing coalition, is more worried about an élite counterterrorism unit run by Maliki's office, which he accuses of arresting scores of opposition politicians and government critics in Diyala. Two months ago, they took the deputy governor, Mohammad Hussein al-Joubouri, and nothing has been heard since about his case. "Of course it's totally political," says one of the governor's aides. "If he is really a terrorist, why didn't they arrest him before he was elected...
...local allies have certainly made massive security gains in Diyala. The al-Qaeda-inspired insurgent groups that once rampaged through the province have been reduced to a handful of criminal cells that attempt the occasional assassination, according to Sheik Hussam al-Mojjma, head of the local Awakening Council - the Sunni citizens brigade largely responsible for defeating al-Qaeda. "When we started fighting al-Qaeda [in 2007] it was just us and the Americans," he says. "Not the army, not the police." But he isn't happy about the way he and his men were treated by the Shi'ite-dominated...
...about what will happen once the U.S. pulls out of Iraq. "Iran will take us," he says. "Everyone in the region will try to occupy Iraq." But what makes the sheik even angrier is the possibility that a future government in Baghdad might turn over disputed areas of northern Diyala to the Kurdistan Regional Government, a body governing a semi-independent Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq. "If that happens, we won't even wait five seconds," he says. "We'll go to war at once...