Iraqis begin sweep of province

BAQOUBA, Iraq – The Iraqi government’s most ambitious effort yet to stamp its authority over long-troubled parts of the country began Tuesday with polite requests to search homes in and near the Diyala provincial capital of Baqouba.

It was a modest and carefully prepared launch of a campaign that Iraqi commanders say will make use of nearly 30,000 Iraqi troops and eventually stretch across a region east of Baghdad that is roughly the size of Maryland. The government’s previous crackdowns focused on individual cities.

“The mission is to clear the whole province … of terrorists and outlaws and to bring back security and stability,” Lt. Gen. Ali Gaidan Najid, commander of the Iraqi ground forces, said at a meeting Tuesday to coordinate operations with U.S. forces. Iraqi soldiers and national police encountered no resistance as they knocked on doors in Baqouba and the town of Ghan Bani Sad, about 15 miles to the south. But this is well-trod ground for the Iraqi forces and their U.S. counterparts, who have conducted repeated operations in the area since last year.

The troops will face a more serious test when they push into the province’s remote hinterlands, where Sunni Arab militants loyal to insurgent groups, including al-Qaida in Iraq, have found sanctuary since they were pushed out of Fallujah in Anbar province in 2004.

The U.S. military believes many insurgent leaders have already fled their hideouts since Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced that he was sending reinforcements into Diyala at the end of June. But they typically leave behind roads riddled with mines, houses rigged to explode and suicide bombers armed with explosive vests.

Diyala, an ethnically and religiously mixed region stretching from the eastern outskirts of Baghdad to the Iranian border, has long been a flashpoint for violence. Al-Qaida in Iraq declared Baqouba the capital of its self-styled Islamic caliphate, and the group’s founding leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, died in a U.S. airstrike near the city in June 2006.

A series of U.S.-led campaigns, which began last year, restored a measure of calm to the main cities and towns along the central portion of the Diyala River, a region of rich farmland laced with canals.

But even with the extra forces deployed under the Bush administration’s troop buildup last year, the U.S. military did not have sufficient numbers to push into more remote parts of the province, where fighters hide among thick palm groves, and in isolated hamlets, vast desert expanses and rugged mountains. Most of the additional forces have returned home this year, and the U.S. presence in Diyala has dropped to less than half the level at its peak last summer.

U.S. commanders, who had been expecting the Iraqi crackdown to begin later in the week, were caught off-guard and scrambled to mobilize backup forces when hundreds of Iraqi troops cordoned off parts of the city before dawn Tuesday and began searching for weapons and fighters.

The U.S. officers’ main concern was that the arrival of large numbers of predominantly Shiite troops to arrest Sunni Arab insurgents could trigger clashes in a region scarred by years of sectarian bloodshed.

Residents too were apprehensive about the treatment they would receive, particularly members of the 10,000-strong local Sunni and Shiite guard force hired by the U.S. military to help ensure insurgents do not return after major clearing operations are completed. Many members of the force are themselves former insurgents now being paid by the Americans to keep order who worry they will be targeted by the Iraqi military for their past crimes.