Before you read this incredibly sad story that is descriptive of the environment in which we work in Diyala Province, the good news is that we've been successful in nominating two women to the new 7-member Provincial Investment Commission.  Other members of our Provincial Reconstruction Team are also achieving similar successes ensuring women their rightful place in the social fabric of Diyala, Iraq.

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Despair Drives Suicide Attacks by Iraqi Women

BAQUBA, Iraq — Wenza Ali Mutlaq walked a bit uncertainly up the long street near the main government offices here on June 22, the hot wind stirring her heavy black abaya. She passed the concrete barricades put up to ward off suicide car bombers and made her way alone, almost haphazardly.

 

Ali Mohammed/European Pressphoto Agency

Iraqis inspecting bodies after a suicide attack last month by a woman wearing an explosive vest in Baquba, in Diyala Province. In addition to the bomber, 15 other people died in the attack.

Reach of War

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Suddenly, a police car zoomed in. A policeman got out to talk with her. And then their lives were over — torn apart, along with 14 other people, by the huge blast of fire from her concealed explosive vest.

Ms. Mutlaq, who was in her 30s and whose attack was captured on a security video, was the 18th female suicide bomber of the war to strike in Diyala Province, which has been hit by female attackers much more frequently than any other province of Iraq, according to Iraqi police records and the American military. So far, 11 of the 20 suicide bombings carried out by women in Iraq this year have occurred in Diyala.

Why so many women? Why now? In a particularly painful twist, the phenomenon seems to have arisen at least in part because of successes in detaining and killing local members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American intelligence officials say is led by foreigners.

The women who become suicide bombers often have lost close male relatives — a husband, a brother, a son — in fighting, because they became suicide bombers themselves or because they were detained by American or Iraqi security forces.

Ms. Mutlaq was no exception: her older brother had already taken the same path, detonating a suicide vest on June 10 during a shootout with Iraqi government forces.

"If there's one single trend that I see, it's the women's relationship with the male figures that were members of A.Q.I. and were captured or killed," said a senior military analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was discussing information that had not been released publicly.

The subordinate role of women in conservative, rural Sunni families in Diyala makes them particularly vulnerable to pressure, said Sajar Qaduri, a member of the Diyala Provincial Council and the only woman on its security committee.

"Although she is bombing herself and aiming to kill people, I feel these women are really victims of terrorism," said Mrs. Qaduri, who is a Shiite and whose husband was kidnapped two years ago and has not been heard from since. "Only women in despair, in desperate situations, would do this. Dealing with such a phenomenon is not easy."

She added: "Our Oriental society is not like your Western society. It seems in many of these cases the women have had their husband killed or sent to prison and she feels she has no choice, she is very depressed."

Female suicide bombers are not a new phenomenon in Iraq or elsewhere, but they have been relatively rare. Since 2003, 43 women have carried out suicide bombings in Iraq, a tiny percentage of the total, according to the United States military. Though the first two cases came in the first year of the war, suicide attacks by women did not really become a trend until 2007, when there were eight such bombings in Iraq. All but one of the female bombers have been Iraqis and most are young, between the ages of 15 and 35, according to the police and American military analysts. Almost all the attacks have been attributed to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which is also known as Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Diyala has been a stronghold for the group since it was chased from Anbar Province in the west in 2004. The province's attraction was clear: it offers easy hiding places in its palm groves and orchards, and a Sunni-majority population that includes many people who supported Saddam Hussein and are sympathetic to the insurgency.

But in the past year, American and Iraqi forces have had much greater success in killing and detaining the group's members in the province, as well as thwarting many of its bigger attack plots. The rise in female suicide bombings has directly coincided with the timing, and the locations, of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia's biggest loss of manpower in Diyala, Baghdad and Anbar.

"Al Qaeda is always innovating: finding new ways to work," said Ghanem al-Khoreishi, the police chief of Diyala. "When we destroyed them in fighting, they started to use new methods. And because they knew that women are treated more gently than men, they began to use them.

"The people don't search them so well even at checkpoints."

Interviews with police officers and politicians, American military analysts and Iraqi women yield different views of the phenomenon. But many agree that the province's traditional, conservative and still largely rural society is a factor.

In Diyala's countryside, most women cannot imagine the world beyond the date palms they see on the horizon. It might be an hourlong walk to the next village, there are no telephones, and cellphones often do not work. Most of the women cannot read.

"Most of the women who have killed themselves are from the villages," said Maj. Gen. Abdul Karim al-Rubaie, the head of the Iraqi Army operations center in Diyala. "She is living a very traditional life. She has no rights."

"For that reason," he added, "her ideas are very small."

During Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia's big push to take over Diyala villages, starting in late 2004, many families yielded to the extremists to protect themselves. Wide networks of villages that support Al Qaeda were created when subtribes, and sometimes even whole tribes, embraced the movement.

"In these families, they are terrorists: the conversations at dinner are about suicide bombs, about explosives, about improvised explosive devices," said Col. Ali Ismari Fateh, a police commander who has been involved in hundreds of interrogations of people suspected of being insurgents.

Mrs. Qaduri, the provincial council member, said she believed that an element of sexual abuse may be involved as well. Many families marry their daughters off to local Qaeda leaders, known as emirs, at age 14 or 15. In some cases the girls are forced into marriage contracts in which they are married to a local emir, but if he dies or is captured, they are obligated to marry his successor and if he is captured or killed, that one's successor.

At the same time, Diyala residents and officials say, militants from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia have worked to instill their radical Islamist vision in the population. Almost immediately after moving in four years ago, they began holding religion classes for men and women.

"Even in Baquba, my niece went to some; she was shaken," said Shamaa Abad al-Kader, the headmistress of a school for girls in Muqdadiya who also serves on Diyala's provincial council.

"They gathered people in the villages; they brought women into Baquba and gave them lectures on how to behave," Ms. Kader said. "These Al Qaeda men were going into the schools, into the mosques and they forced people to listen to them. My niece said the man who came to her school had a long beard and a sword with him."

Insurgent recruiters and religion instructors add promises to the threats, too, assuring people that they will go to paradise if they die fighting for Islam — a sometimes alluring dream for many in their largely poor, uneducated audience, said police officials and politicians in Diyala.

In some cases, it may not just be a matter of co-opting or persuading vulnerable women. In one case in April recounted by Police Chief Khoreishi, a woman came to the station asking for protection; she was being forced to become a suicide bomber and trained to use an explosive belt by two members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, one of them a close relative. The police now have her in protective custody, and two people suspected of being group members are in detention.

Iraqi police officials also say that a few of the bombings involved women wearing vests that were exploded by remote control, though it is unclear exactly how many because explosions usually destroy telltale design details about the detonators.

"There are two ways a suicide vest can work: there is a button they can push themselves and there is a remote control detonation," Colonel Fateh said. "They follow her and if they think she is afraid to do it, then they will do it for her."

Mrs. Qaduri believes that knowing the basic profile of the women who tend to become suicide bombers can inform policing: if a woman has a male family member who kills himself or is killed in the name of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia or one of its sister organizations, it should be a warning sign that she or other close female relatives are at risk of becoming bombers.

Her dream is to start an intervention program that would take the women out of their homes and put them in shelters where they could not harm themselves or anyone else.

"We can predict that such a woman is ready to be used as a suicide bomber," she said. "But at the same time, we don't have any concrete proof that we can use to detain these women."

Ms. Mutlaq's life and death track the profile described by Mrs. Qaduri and others.

A native of the rural area south of Buhriz in southern Diyala, about 40 minutes northeast of Baghdad, she grew up in a landscape of date palms and orange orchards fed by irrigation canals.

Her tribe aligned itself early on with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and her brother and husband became influential emirs, officials said. Buhriz was one of the most violent areas of Diyala in 2005 and 2006, with periods when there were nearly weekly bombings.

Last June, her husband was killed while fighting in Baquba, the province's capital, around the time that the American offensive in the city began, according to Baquba police officials. Almost exactly a year after that, her brother detonated his suicide vest during fighting with government forces.

Twelve days later, she walked alone past the barricades.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/15/AR2008041500508.html?referrer=myspace

While this was across the street from the Diyala government center, most of us, Iraqi and US, consider it an anomaly. Still it's terribly sad, heartbreaking to see, let alone be so close to such mindless, brutal waste of precious lives.

Two Bombs Kill Nearly 60 People, Injure Scores in Iraq

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, April 16, 2008; A10

BAGHDAD, April 15 -- Two bombings killed nearly 60 people Tuesday in parts of Iraq where U.S. and Iraqi forces have claimed significant success in combating Sunni insurgent groups.

A car bombing in central Baqubah, the capital of northeastern Diyala province, killed at least 47 people, an Iraqi military spokesman said. A suicide bomber in Ramadi, west of Baghdad in Anbar province, killed at least 10 people at a restaurant frequented by police, according to local officials. Bombs also exploded in Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul, but the U.S. military said those blasts did not cause fatalities.

The U.S. military said the bombings in Baqubah and Ramadi appeared to have been carried out by al-Qaeda in Iraq, a predominantly homegrown Sunni insurgent group that has often targeted policemen and other representatives of Iraq's Shiite-led government.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq has conducted fewer attacks in recent months and seemed to have lost influence as a result of U.S.-led military operations and campaigns to turn the local population against the insurgency. American officials have warned that the group remains a potent threat.

U.S. and Iraqi commanders have focused lately on Shiite militias, after an Iraqi-led offensive in the southern city of Basra late last month that sparked violent resistance from militia members there and in Baghdad.

Iraqi officials in Diyala said Tuesday evening that the bomb, which was hidden in a Chevrolet sedan parked in a busy area known as Old Baqubah, also wounded 82 people. Earlier in the day, the U.S. military said the blast had killed 36 people and injured 67.

The victims included women and children, and many of the injured were in critical condition Tuesday, said Col. Ali Jassem, a spokesman for a local military center staffed by Iraqi and U.S. military personnel.

Jassem called the bombing the "most devastating attack to have taken place in Diyala since 2003," and noted that the assailants penetrated an area that was considered relatively secure.

"Half of the dead people are still at the Baqubah morgue because it is so hard to identify their bodies," Jassem said.

The bomb detonated at approximately 12:30 p.m. as people were filling out government forms at a nearby courthouse. It destroyed 15 vehicles, set 13 shops on fire and killed people in buses driving past the sedan at the time of the blast, Iraqi officials said.

The bomb killed at least one policeman and damaged a restaurant frequented by members of Iraq's security forces, Jassem said. Courthouses have been targeted in the past by Sunni insurgents, who reject the legitimacy of Iraq's government.

Courthouses have become busy in recent weeks because scores of Iraqis have filed applications to get loved ones released from government custody under a recently approved amnesty law.

Abdullah Jabar al-Qaisi, one of the people wounded in Baqubah, said he had been heading to court to fill out paperwork to secure the release of his brother.

"I heard a loud Wham! that lifted me to the air and threw me back on the ground," he said. "I saw body pieces and human bodies flying and slapping the ground."

Jassem Muhsin Alwan, a doctor at a Baqubah hospital, said more than 85 people were being treated there. "Many families are still coming around looking for their sons," he said.

The attacks came shortly after the release of a recorded message attributed to Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, a Sunni umbrella organization believed to have been founded by al-Qaeda in Iraq. The message was uploaded on a Web site frequently used by the Islamic State of Iraq to communicate with its followers.

The message urged people to break ties with Iraqi security forces and Awakening councils, groups made up of Sunnis who oppose extremists. It encouraged supporters to step up attacks against U.S. forces and also Iraqis working with them. The authenticity of the message could not be confirmed.

U.S. military officials in Baqubah said violence in the area has dropped by 80 percent since June. Capt. Stephen Bomar, a U.S. military spokesman, called the bombing a "random act of violence from a desperate enemy."

In Ramadi, at least 10 people were killed when a suicide bomber detonated explosives inside a restaurant, according to Tariq Yousif al-Asal al-Dulaimi, a police commander. "University students and policemen usually attend this restaurant," he said.

A patron who was injured in that attack said the bomber walked into the restaurant wearing a dishdasha, a long tunic commonly worn by Arab men. A waiter invited him to take a seat anywhere he wanted.

After screaming "God is great," the bomber "blew himself up," said the diner, Fawzi Mohammed al-Swedawi, 43.

In Mosul, where U.S. officials said members of al-Qaeda in Iraq have gathered after leaving other parts of the country, a roadside bomb exploded near an Iraqi police checkpoint at approximately 3:45 p.m. as a U.S. military convoy was passing through, a U.S. military spokeswoman said. As the first responders approached the scene, a car bomb exploded. Three Iraqi policemen and 15 civilians were wounded.

"The enemy continues to maim innocent civilians and harm those trying to come to their aid," Maj. Peggy Kageleiry, a U.S. military spokeswoman, said by e-mail. "It's cruel and inhuman, and despite this, new recruits are continuing to come into" Iraqi security forces.

In the central Baghdad district of Rusafa, a car bomb wounded 11 people, the U.S. military said.

Meanwhile, in Karbala, south of Baghdad, suspected Shiite militia members kidnapped six Iraqi soldiers, said Rahman Imshawir, a police spokesman in the city.

Five of the soldiers were killed and showed signs of torture, according to Salim Kadhim, the director of Karbala's health department.

"We have received five dead bodies of the soldiers," he said. "Their arms and legs were broken, and they were shot in the head and the chest."

In the south, three aides to Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, escaped assassination in separate attacks Tuesday, although two of them were seriously wounded, the Associated Press reported.

Special correspondents Zaid Sabah, K.I. Ibrahim and Naseer Nouri in Baghdad and Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.

UNCLASSIFIED BAGHDAD 00001157  

R 140642Z APR 08 FM AMEMBASSY BAGHDAD

TO ROEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 6832 INFO ROCNRAQ/IRAQ COLLECTIVE

E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: PREL, PGOV, EAGR, ECON, ETRD, EAID, EFIN, IZ

 

SUBJECT: PRT DIYALA:

ENCOURAGING SIGNS IN DIYALA WITH PASSAGE OF BUDGET, IMPROVED SECURITY ENVIRONMENT, AND NEW PRT STAFFING

 

1.      This is a PRT Diyala reporting cable.
 

2.      SUMMARY

(U)The Diyala Provincial Government is increasingly eager to engage with the PRT thanks to improving security, the onset of the election season, the long-delayed passage of the 2008 provincial budget coupled with initial execution of the 2006 and 2007 provincial budgets, as well as a boost in PRT staffing. The arrival of a number of non-DoD subject matter experts (SME) to augment the PRT, and most recently the arrival of RTI to conduct training for provincial employees and elected officials have contributed to the sudden surge of interest in interaction from the previously moribund Provincial Government. END SUMMARY.

 

IMPROVED SECURITY AND BUDGET EXECUTION PROMPTING PROGRESS

 

3. (U)The success of recent joint US-Iraqi military operations in Diyala has provided the Provincial Government space to begin providing essential services to areas formerly controlled by Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). GOI monies for projects at all levels are becoming available, and contracts, some from 2006, are being executed. The recent and long delayed passage of the 2008 provincial budget, coupled with recent GOI announcements of supplemental budget availability contingent on expenditure of current budgets, is motivating all levels of the Diyala Provincial Government to move more rapidly to secure and conspicuously distribute their piece of the fiscal pie before the election cycle heats up.

 

PROVINCIAL COUNCIL INCREASES ENGAGEMENT

4. (U) Provincial Council (PC) Committee members have increased the pace and depth of contact of collaborative meetings with the PRT in an effort to jump-start stalled programs and increase the perception of PC member involvement. Recent decisions affecting USG unwillingness to further fund capital projects, while initially disconcerting to Iraqi officials, have been taken in stride as officials are encouraged to access the funds available through the GOI.

 

5. (U) Members of two provincial council committees, Education and Internally Displaced Persons (lDP), regularly request weekly meetings with the PRT and transportation to attend events with local military units. School re-openings and medical missions to lDP clusters, regardless of PC involvement with the project, are now all objects of intense PC interest. The Provincial Health Committee, comprised of the PRT public health liaisons, the acting Director General (DG) of Health, and the members of the PC health committee, has additionally established a weekly meeting schedule to discuss projects and greater outreach opportunities. Previously, the Health DG was very involved with policy issues but never engaged the PC health committee. This increased interest in engagement comes at a critical time for Diyala, with the beginning of a large infusion of funds from the past budgets finally moving into the execution phase, and the GOI publicly announcing the promise of new monies almost daily. Diyala residents have high expectations of provincial government officials, who know that they must convey the message that they are the driving force behind real progress in the province if they hope to retain their seats in upcoming elections.

 

INCREASED PRT STAFFING BOOSTS OPERATIONS

6.  (U) Highly-qualified civilian SMEs who recently joined the PRT are a tremendous boon to the increased interaction between the PRT and the Provincial Government. Engineers, city planners, business development experts, public health personnel, and agronomists have rushed to establish contact and relationships with various provincial council committees and are successfully energizing relationships with previously unengaged sectors of Diyala society. Although still handicapped by a chronic shortage of linguist support, the addition of SMEs has given a great boost to PRT operations.

 

(U) The combination of an improved security environment and recent passage of the 2008 provincial budget has accelerated the pace of progress in Diyala. However, there remain concerns that pre-election violence could jeopardize the gains made in the last few months. The PRT and its military colleagues continue to focus efforts on budget execution with non-stop follow-up in essential service improvements province-wide. These are the key elements to ensure that progress continues through the election cycle and into the next provincial administration.

 

BUTENIS BT #1157