Nobody promised us air conditioning, buuuuut there were assurances of some level of quality of life coming to this foresaken place.  So when my A/C unit quit working yesterday , the 6th time in two months, and as the temp passed 130F again this week, I rallied a modicum of good nature in my note to our PRT Seargeant Major.  He loved it, and promised to get it replaced.  Great timing of course, not, as I'm packing for my additional duty on the Iranian border...

eMail, 073108

To:  Sergeant Major Rob Bruce,

I regret to inform you of the impending death of my often unfaithful companion, the one with the flashing shutters always looking over my shoulder.  Whilst there have been a few times that it has cooled my Russian anger and calmed my Irish whit, it now only whispers warmth and fans the flames of my disappointment in the five attempts at resuscitation.   Let's not go for six, unless it is a sailor's deep six.

It’s now time, did I mention after five (5) unsuccessful “repairs”, for our friends at KBR (the support contractor for this base) to make the big decision and install the prepositioned compressor setting in the Econ Building hallway…  Please guide them to that realization.  Resurrection only worked for one guy I know; A/C units don’t count…  That’s office #3, the penultimate one on the left side walking down the Econ hallway.

Thanks,   Art

Arthur Humphries
Sr. Business Development Advisor
and PRT Lead, North and East Diyala
US Department of State
Provincial Reconstruction Team - Diyala

Local Iraqi Government Offers Positive Response to Drought  -- Diyala water officials partner with PRT on innovative measures

By Gene Arnold, U.S. Provincial Reconstruction Team Diyala, Iraq
July 25, 2008

Baqubah, Diyala, Iraq -- As temperatures soar past 130F in Diyala Province drought is approaching a point that threatens humans as well as livestock challenging the planning and implementation capabilities of local water departments.

The past winter’s low rainfall in Diyala follows two years of reduced rainfall resulting in an alarming drop in water levels in local reservoirs. Wheat yields have also been affected as planting this year was severely reduced while livestock herds have been devastated.

After nearly two years of sustained insurgent activity and violence throughout the Province much of the water infrastructure had been damaged or neglected. Nonetheless progress on tackling water shortages has been consistent.

Facing a potential catastrophe the Diyala Provincial Government responded positively to the looming crisis with a wide range of initiatives from canal clearance, increased well-digging and innovative livestock maintenance programs.

As winter drew to an end, after below average rainfall, the provincial departments of water resources, irrigation, and wells prepared a multi-pronged strategy for the summer months that included input from the Diyala Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT).

The PRTs (Provincial Reconstruction Team) are a Department of State-led civilian-military initiative that helps provincial and local governments build capacity to serve their citizens through a range of governance and economic development programs. There are a total of twenty nine teams throughout Iraq manned by over four-hundred civilian volunteers and an equal number of military personnel.

Diyala’s irrigation department implemented a plan for canal repair and clearance that also removed illegal taps and pumps from the water ways ensuring that water would be distributed according to schedule and that theft and hoarding would be minimized.

Responding to a request by the irrigation department, the Diyala PRT prepared draft technical specifications for the procurement of 20 horizontal pumps for irrigation purposes. This technical assistance will enable the Diyala Government to increase the flow of water for irrigation.

The department of water resources focused on potable water for human consumption and began increasing the number of water tanker trucks serving the Province. Fifteen new trucks have been delivered to the Province and 35 more have been requested.

Communities like Khan Bani Saad, which have been hit particularly hard because water from wells in the area are too saline for human consumption, have already seen a 33% increase in daily potable water deliveries. In addition, the department of wells began an ambitious campaign of well drilling. One hundred and eightyfour sites were chosen for new well drilling and additional existing wells for rehabilitation and improvements.

So far, 48 wells have been drilled with four new wells being completed each week. Most importantly, the plan prioritized the drilling schedule by greatest need and most abundant supply of fresh water so that the communities hardest hit by the drought would receive relief first.

The Diyala PRT’s water adviser was able to help when four wells in the province produced water with fine sand and he was able to recommend a course of action to identify the source of the sand, a first step in developing a strategy for either removing the sand at the source with better filtration, or by diverting the water to a treatment facility.

Livestock – cattle, sheep and goats -- are also suffering as the drought becomes more severe. Most of the feedstock and forage available to herds during a year with normal precipitation died off in the drought. To offset the problem the Ministry of Trade has developed an emergency feed distribution program in partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture. The program allocates about 50 pounds of grain for each sheep or goat being raised.

Diyala’s department of agriculture is administering the program. The grain is to be shipped into Diyala from Erbil and will be stored in a central distribution silo near Baqubah. Agriculture unit managers from Diyala’s rural districts will be responsible for counting the number of animals in each herdsman’s flock and verifying the quantity of grain distributed.

The supplemental feed allotment is designed to ensure that the animals remain productive and to carry the flocks into the next rainy season when forage should revive.

The water crisis in Diyala Province is not over but it is more apparent every day that the Province’s Government is addressing the problem and is better able to develop solutions now than compared to a year ago.
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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.