Baquba:
An Unknown City Erupts
By Ali Al-Fadhily
& Dahr Jamail
11 October, 2006
Inter
Press Service
BAQUBA, Oct 9 (IPS)
- The little known city of Baquba is emerging as one of the hotbeds
of resistance in Iraq, with clashes breaking out every day.
The violence in this city
50km northeast of Baghdad is also now spreading elsewhere around Diyala
province.
"The new waves of terror
are now forming a variety that we predicted long ago," a political
leader in the city told IPS. "The Iraqi people have complained
to everyone, but naturally no one will do anything about it. We know
who is in charge and who is responsible and eventually who is to be
dammed. It is the government of the United States of America."
The local leader, speaking
from his home in Baquba, said the situation in the area was becoming
dire in the face of the recent violence.
"The worst is the direct
participation of the national security forces in criminal acts, and
the U.S. Army's sudden disappearance from the scene as soon as those
murderers show up," he said. Many have been killed, and hundreds
arrested in the province, he said.
The al-Tawafuq Sunni party
has demanded a full investigation into the violence in Baquba, and immediate
release of the detained civilians. "We are sure the arrests were
made under sectarian flags and those detainees are innocent farmers
captured in their own plantations," the group said in a statement.
An Iraqi army colonel told
reporters in Diyala last week that that U.S. troops had arrested 10
Iraqi soldiers suspected of sectarian killings. There was no official
U.S. comment.
Iraqi MP Muhammad al-Dayni
appeared on al-Jazeera television to say that Brigadier al-Kaabi, leader
of the fifth division in charge of Diyala province security, had led
the arrest of 400 civilians. Hundreds of houses had been looted, he
said. Al-Dayni accused the parties in power of supporting such acts,
referring to the Shia parties in parliament.
The fighting has intensified
now, but Baquba has long been a city of fierce resistance to the occupation.
Resistance groups have often frustrated the efforts of the Multi-National
Forces (MNF) and Iraqi security forces to bring the city under their
control.
Residents of Baquba told
IPS that an Iraqi police brigadier-general had used loudspeakers to
announce dire warnings to residents.
"We were used to hearing
our own government calling us terrorists, Saddamists and Zarqawis before,
but this man added new words to the vocabulary like bastards and expressions
of that sort," Abu Omar, a law student at Diyala University told
IPS. "Yet we were not surprised because we know he was just repeating
what his green zone masters have always said."
Mazin al-Zaidy, a resident
of Baquba, told IPS that the situation in Diyala province could be the
worst in Iraq because people of many ethnicities live in the area. "The
MNF and militias concentrate on clearing it of the Arab Sunnis prior
to any federalism plan."
Al-Zaidy said "there
are Kurds, Shias and Sunnis who share the province, and that has to
be altered for the benefit of the first two groups." Al-Zaidy was
referring to the towns Mendily, Jalowlaa and surrounding areas that
are marked Kurdish on the Kurdistan map.
The influence of each group
changes often. "Each day I wake up I don't know who is in control
of my city," said a religious sheikh in Baquba who asked to be
referred to as Sheikh Ahmed. "One day it is the Americans, the
next day a militia, the next day a resistance group."
Diyala province gets little
media attention "because of the journalists' fear of going in,"
said al-Zaidy.
The new violence has ripped
apart old traditions, he said. "The people of the province do not
understand how these powers could turn it into a sectarian city from
a wonderful 1,400 years of community peace and intermarriages."
The U.S. military has announced
meanwhile that bomb attacks in Baghdad have hit an all-time high. The
number of U.S. soldiers killed is now approaching the 3,000 mark.
The number of Iraqi casualties
runs into hundreds of thousands.
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