Baquba

This is from early June.

Hello everyone,

I have spent several days at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Warhorse, which is in the city of Baquba. Baquba is located northeast of Baghdad in Diyala province. Diyala is one of those provinces in the north that is still somewhat volatile. Having said that, just about 18 months ago, Diyala was more than just volatile – it was a massive killing field. As the US surge began, Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) began heading north out of Baghdad. As they moved north, they set up slaughter houses all throughout Diyala. Diyala is a mixed Shiite/Sunni province, and it is split with about 50% of each sect living there. Baquba is the largest city in the province, and it is also split evenly between Shia and Sunni. AQI was obviously targeting Shiite victims, and the Shiites began to go after Sunnis in return. Over 100 people per week were being murdered in Diyala during parts of 2006 and 2007.

As the US forces moved into Diyala 15 months ago, AQI began moving further north. Diyala was one of those provinces where the Sons of Iraq (SoI) citizen groups began to stand up, which was a large reason that AQI left the area. The SoI in Diyala were mainly Sunni at the time, and this lack of support by their own sect made it tough for AQI to stick around. They still have a small presence in Diyala, but they haven’t been able to create too much trouble there. They are hard at work trying to recruit female suicide vest wearers, and they have managed to find a couple of “volunteers” for that task in the past couple of months.

The main Shiite criminal elements in Diyala are the al-Mahdi army militants. Sadr city sits on the northeast edge of Baghdad, so the al-Mahdi thugs don’t have all that far to go to get up to Diyala.

During my trip to Baquba, I spent time with another Police Transition Team (PTT). This one was the 202nd Military Police (MP) Company out of Ft. Eustis, Virginia. They are responsible for training all of the Iraqi Police (IP) in Diyala province with the exception of a few stations in the northeast tip of Diyala. They are a busy group of MPs.

I went with one of the PTT squads as they patrolled Baquba, which included a visit with a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) station and a regular police sub-station. QRF police are a little better trained and equipped than are the police at the regular stations. Unlike many of the regular IP stations, this station had functioning staff officers in place, such as an armorer, a training officer, a supply officer, etc. The chief was an ex-army officer, so he runs a tight ship as far as discipline. He even brought one of his police officers in to chew him out in front of us for not being in proper uniform. I didn’t understand a word the chief was saying, but it was clear that this officer was getting a thorough tongue lashing.

Like the chief in Mosul who I met, this chief had a decent sense of humor as well. Apparently one of the most important pieces of equipment to these police chiefs is their TV set and satellite TV hookup. When we went into this chief’s office (Chief Hussein), he was watching the Blue Collar Comedy show – the one with Larry the Cable Guy and his buddies. The chief thought that I was a wimp for not smoking his cigarettes with him. I did the chai tea and I even ate a hometown Baquba apple, but I wouldn’t go for the cigarette. So I guess I’m a wimp, or whatever the corresponding trait is in Arabic.

The big internal challenge that the PTT teams face is the lack of qualified translators. It was painful to listen to the translator struggle with his English and then try to communicate to the IP in Arabic. Some of these chiefs understand English better than some of the translators, and the PTT members say that the chiefs will have to correct the translators on occasion. The best translators are those who are US citizens and who have returned to work for the US here. Meanwhile, these translators who are recruited locally have to be watched carefully. One of them stood there on Warhorse and called in rocket fire on the base using his cell phone. The dope is lucky that he didn’t get hit himself, but he is now in US custody.

Although Diyala province is one of the more active northern provinces, I need to put that in perspective by pointing out that the enemy activity is down to a few of contacts per day between them and IP or US forces in that province. The situation is similar to Mosul in that the heavy presence of police and army checkpoints has severely limited the ability of the insurgents to plant IEDs or to move freely around the cities, so they have resorted to suicide vests and cars packed with explosives, although there haven’t been all that many instances of those types of explosives recently. A suicide bomber tried to drive his car into an IP station a couple of weeks ago, but with the better protection that the police have put in place for their stations, the driver had to blow himself up outside of the barriers. Unfortunately, he did manage to kill one IP who was outside at the time. One of the police officers showed me a plaque in the QRF station that listed names of 169 police officers from that station alone. These were all of the officers who have been killed by terrorist activity since 2003 from just that station. The station has 475 officers right now, so you can see that they are literally making sacrifices by holding down these jobs. Most of those police deaths occurred in the 2005-2006 time period.

The calming of Diyala has been accomplished in large part due to a good US operation combined with a very determined Iraqi police commander at the provincial level. The large US Brigade in Diyala is departing next month as part of the surge drawdown, leaving a smaller US presence in the province. The commander of this US Brigade had two years to prepare for his deployment, so he did some smart training during that time period. He put hundreds of his soldiers through intensive Arab language training, so that proved valuable with the lack of translators. He had his junior leaders conduct ride-alongs with the police in the Ft. Lewis, Washington, area to get a feel for how to get information from the public and how to earn their trust. COL Lehr and his staff also met regularly with mayors and city managers back home to learn the basics of running cities and towns so that they would be better informed on how to teach the Iraqis the basics of city management.

The US Commander also regularly used the carrot and stick approach with the communities in Diyala. Despite the new existence of elected government officials in the cities and towns, the Sheiks still have great influence all around Iraq. Anytime attacks against US forces or civilians in an area would begin to rise, COL Lehr would cut off money for the local projects or electric power to the towns in that area. He would also conduct what is called “terrain denial fire” in areas that have been hot with attacks on US forces. He said that before long, the local Sheiks would come in and tell him that they have put a stop to the attacks and they would ask him to please turn on the power and resources again. The higher levels of security have given the people a chance to get businesses running again and the police have had a chance to become a little more proactive rather than strictly reactive. As business has picked up, people are making money off of the economy rather than by participating in the insurgency.

Although Diyala has a governor, the man who is making a difference in the province is named General Ganum. He is the head of law enforcement in the province. He tends to have a strong concern for the people and they know it. There are a couple of towns in Diyala that went without power for a long time, and the Iraqi officials in Diyala kept promising that power would be in place by certain dates. GEN Ganum got fed up with the false promises, so he arrested the top three officials who were responsible for the power projects in Diyala. He told them that as soon as power was being provided to the towns, he would release them from jail. Electric power was running to these towns in no time, and GEN Ganum even paid these arrestees for the work that was finally completed. I’m not sure that this technique would go over so well in the US, but hey, this isn’t the US.

During a bridge opening ceremony, while others were applauding the bridge that the US engineers constructed over the Diyala River, GEN Ganum was looking at the water level of the river. He noticed how high the water was flowing, and he ordered that irrigation equipment be brought in to route a good portion of the water to the farmers in Diyala, who have been suffering through a drought. He scored huge points with the citizens, which is pretty important in a counter-insurgency fight. On top of this, GEN Ganum is relentless in his push to get the captured insurgents convicted of their crimes. He is another ex-Saddam era military officer.

As far as the Iraqi operation in Mosul, it is moving along nicely. Iraqi army commanders have been asking what they should do as AQI members approach them and ask to surrender. They have never seen anything like this (except when their army was surrendering to us), so they weren’t sure how to handle this. The Iraqi army is literally conducting door-to-door house searches in Mosul to confiscate weapons and evidence of insurgent supporters. Their intelligence has been pretty good as far as identifying the insurgents up there. They have been finding weapons dumped in trash bins, and they are uncovering massive weapons caches. One cache contained over 1800 rocket propelled grenades, which will be 1800 grenades not fired at our guys. AQI types seem to be laying low for awhile until they can figure out how serious the Iraqi army is. The Iraqi general in Mosul is realistic in that he understands that AQI will try to return as soon as the current operation ends, but they have lost a lot of arms and ammunition (and supporters) to the operation so far.

The attached pictures are from Baquba. One is just a traffic circle in town. The other one is obviously a couple of Baqubian kids – future allies or future terrorists? We didn’t stop to give them candy, so they were probably leaning towards terrorist that day.
Take care