Desperate times call for uncomfortable alliances
BAQUBAH, IRAQ — U.S. soldiers on patrol here recently watched a man walk into the street with a bomb and begin to dig. They killed him before he finished. Out stepped another man to finish the job, so they shot him too -- then another, and another and another.
In all, five people tried to place the makeshift bundle of munitions in the same hole within an hour.
"You see what we're up against," said Adam Jacobs, a 26-year-old Army captain, after recounting the astonishing story.
Despite a major push by U.S. forces this year to retake deadly Diyala province by focusing on insurgent outposts in Baqubah, huge sections of the city have no meaningful American or Iraqi security presence.
The roads are riddled with explosives powerful enough to kill soldiers inside every vehicle at their disposal. Al Qaeda in Iraq caravans career through the streets with men openly carrying machine guns.
Many of the militants arrived in Diyala after being pressured out of portions of Baghdad by the U.S. troop buildup there. Even more were pushed out of Al Anbar province, the desert hinterland west of Baghdad, when tribal sheiks who had harbored them decided to form an alliance to expel them.
Diyala is now the primary sanctuary for the militant group, and some American officers worry that the insurgents will spread out into the country at an increasing rate. The future, they worry, will be marked by an increasingly sophisticated armed resistance to U.S. and Iraqi security forces, and the imposition of a stringent fundamentalist vision of Islam on the people within the fighters' grip.
On a per-capita basis, Diyala has proved to be the deadliest place in Iraq for American troops, although its total casualties trail those in Baghdad.
The violence here also contributed to the high toll in April and May, the deadliest two-month period for Americans in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
The situation is so desperate that U.S. forces over the last month decided to seek uncomfortable alliances with some of the groups that have killed Americans but now say they hate the group Al Qaeda in Iraq even more, and are willing to fight it.
Members of the 1920 Revolution Brigade, a Sunni resistance group that is dedicated to the expulsion of U.S. forces and takes its name from the revolt that pushed out the British occupation, are among those newly granted the right to patrol with U.S.-supplied uniforms and be exempt from AK-47 weapons seizures, said Lt. Col. James D. George, the acting American commander in the province.
