BAGHDAD — Iraqi infantry, supported by artillery, the Iraqi air force and U.S. forces, on Tuesday began what was described as a major operation in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. Iraqi forces said they’d encountered no resistance to the crackdown, which the army had announced six days earlier.
Residents of Baqubah, the provincial capital, woke to find new checkpoints in neighborhoods throughout the city, but most people stayed in their houses. Troops arrested 20 suspected insurgents in the south and west quarters of the city, according to a spokesman for Ali Ghaidan, the commander of Iraqi ground troops in the province.
As many as 30,000 troops from the 4th and 8th divisions of the Iraqi army were deployed, the spokesman said.
“The situation until now has been very good, and people are cooperating,” said the spokesman, who couldn’t be identified under the ground rules that Ghaidan set. “Even those who run away will be chased, because authorities are gathering information (about their hiding places). We even know the places they went to and we will chase them in all the provinces.”
The spokesman said that the offensive’s main aim was to clear the province and its suburbs “of terrorists and outlaws” and the secondary aim was to secure the border with Iran.
Diyala province — predominantly Sunni Muslim Arab but with large Shiite Muslim Arab and Kurdish minorities — has been the scene of some of the bloodiest sectarian violence in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion, and remains one of the most restive — and lethal — provinces in the country.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq declared an Islamic state in Diyala in 2006, and its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, used the region as a base until a U.S. airstrike killed him there later that year.
Over the past two years, fighters from many Sunni insurgent groups in Diyala and the western province of Anbar united under the banner of the Awakening, a U.S.-funded group that has been instrumental in crippling al-Qaeda in Iraq.
While al-Qaeda in Iraq has continued attacking police and Awakening fighters in Diyala, many of the Iraqi commando operations in recent weeks have targeted the so-called “special groups,” anti-government Shiite militias that U.S. military officials say have received training and funding in Iran.
