Troops in Diyala Face A Skilled, Flexible Foe

"For each real one, they had put three or four false IEDs. They had intentionally put in crushed wires, pressure plates, different IED techniques that we would recognize," said Capt. Ben Richards, a company commander with the Stryker unit. The decoys slowed down the patrols, and provided enough time for insurgents to launch coordinated attacks involving rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and machine-gun fire.

"We found ourselves in three straight days of urban combat with some very skilled insurgents," Richards said. "Militarily, they were very well thought out. This wasn't a group of guys that just wanted to die. They had planned their defenses of the area very well."

These types of coordinated ambushes have become more frequent in Diyala: In March the U.S. military counted 27 complex attacks, in comparison with 14 in April 2006, 17 in July 2006, 26 in October 2006, and 14 in January of this year.

The makeup of the fighters in Diyala defies easy characterization, and Col. David W. Sutherland, the top U.S. military commander in the province, said any guesswork as to their numbers would be impossible.

The U.S. military cites the hard-line Islamic insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq as its primary enemy, but there is also an intricate and ever-changing taxonomy of rival tribes, insurgent organizations, criminal networks, Sunni and Shiite militias, and Islamic fighters from throughout the Middle East who have come to the province to join the fray.

The Baqubah area is home to many loyalists of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and military and intelligence officers who served in his government, who have supported insurgent groups such as the 1920 Revolution Brigades. Soldiers based near Muqdadiyah, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, say groups of Chechen rebels operate near their city and train insurgents, and many are convinced that al-Qaeda camps are hidden under the dense palm fronds.

"These guys are smart. The Iraqi insurgent as a whole has really adapted well to our tactics and have learned a lot," said 1st Lt. Anthony Von Plinsky, 28, a platoon leader near Muqdadiyah. "They know how to bury things without us seeing them, they know how to trigger it without us knowing."

"Every time we react to a contact, they take that and learn from it. I hate to give credit to somebody who has no rules, but they're pretty good."

Al-Qaeda in Iraq, operating under the banner of an umbrella group called the Islamic State of Iraq, has managed to drive out Shiites from many cities and villages in Diyala. Shiites in Baqubah, who once made up about 45 percent of the population, now account for about 20 percent, said Sutherland. In March, gunmen laid siege to the Shiite village of Towakel, northeast of Muqdadiyah, burning dozens of homes, slaughtering livestock and leaving a smoldering ghost town in their wake. On wall after wall they scrawled graffiti proclaiming the village the domain of the Islamic State of Iraq.

"They just stormed in one night and started on the southwest side and started burning their way all the way up this one road," said Von Plinsky. The Shiite villagers "had defenses built up . . . but they just got overpowered. They got decimated."

In November, al-Qaeda fighters overwhelmed and destroyed an Iraqi police station just south of Baqubah. The next month, the Iraqi army pulled out of the area.

At the same time, rifts have opened among insurgent groups that U.S. and Iraqi forces are hoping to exploit. In early April, U.S. military officers watched footage from surveillance drones of what they believed to be fighters from the 1920 Revolution Brigades -- a group formed in 2003 under a name that refers to Iraq's resistance to British colonialism -- engaged in street battles with al-Qaeda in Iraq fighters in Baqubah.