The context, the texture, and the things that don't make it into after-action reports or the evening news. I was there with 2-35 Infantry.
This is not a clinical history. It's written by someone who was on the ground in Diyala Province during one of the most violent periods of the Iraq War. I'll give you the historical context — accurately — but I'll also tell you what the context felt like from inside it. These are not the same thing, and both matter.
Most Americans who paid attention to the Iraq War in 2006 and 2007 heard about Fallujah, Ramadi, Baghdad. They heard "the surge." They heard casualty counts and political arguments about what it all meant. What most of them didn't hear much about was Baqubah — which is a shame, because Baqubah and Diyala Province were, for a significant stretch of that period, among the most dangerous places in Iraq. And what happened there was more complicated, more human, and more instructive than most of the news coverage suggested.
Baqubah is the capital of Diyala Province, located roughly 50 kilometers northeast of Baghdad along the Diyala River. It sits at a geographic and demographic crossroads that made it strategically significant and operationally complex in ways that Baghdad or purely Sunni or purely Shia areas were not.
Diyala was mixed. Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish populations lived in proximity — sometimes in the same neighborhoods, sometimes in towns that faced each other across the river. There were date palm farms and orange groves. There were market towns that had functioned relatively normally before the war. There were also deep historical grievances, sectarian fault lines that had been suppressed under Saddam but not resolved, and a physical geography — river systems, agricultural terrain, scattered villages — that was difficult to surveil and easy to move through if you knew it.
After the 2003 invasion, Diyala became a transit corridor. By 2006 it had become something more acute: a sanctuary and a battleground simultaneously.
The February 2006 bombing of the Al-Askari mosque in Samarra — one of Shia Islam's holiest sites — is widely cited as the moment that accelerated Iraq's descent into sectarian civil war. The effects were national, but they landed with particular force in mixed areas like Diyala.
What followed in Baqubah over the next year was a grinding, ugly process: neighborhoods that had been mixed for generations became contested, then cleansed. Sunni families in Shia-majority areas fled or were driven out. Shia families in Sunni-majority areas faced the same. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), operating under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi until his death in June 2006 and then under his successors, actively accelerated this process. Sectarian violence was not just a byproduct of the fighting — it was a strategy. Forcing displacement, eliminating moderate voices from both communities, making coexistence seem impossible: these were objectives.
By late 2006 and into 2007, AQI had declared Baqubah the capital of their so-called "Islamic State of Iraq" — a declaration that was partly propaganda and partly a reflection of real operational control in certain areas. They weren't everywhere in Diyala, but where they were, they were organized and brutal.
AQI's methods in Diyala during this period included:
What made Diyala particularly difficult operationally was the terrain. The river systems and agricultural fields gave AQI multiple routes and hiding places that didn't exist in urban environments. The population density was lower outside Baqubah city, which made surveillance harder and movement easier for insurgents who knew the ground.
American strategy in Iraq in 2006 was in a difficult place. The theory of transition — training Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) to take over the fight so coalition forces could draw down — was running ahead of the reality. In Diyala, the Iraqi police and army units were at varying states of capacity, and some were infiltrated. Some were actively complicit in sectarian violence on behalf of Shia militias. The complexity of distinguishing between genuinely corrupted units, undertrained-but-salvageable units, and effective partners was one of the central challenges of that period.
The American units operating in Diyala during this period — including elements of the 3rd Infantry Division and the 25th Infantry Division — were working with a mosaic of local relationships that had to be rebuilt or constructed from scratch in many cases. Who to trust. Who was playing both sides. Which sheikhs were under AQI pressure and which were genuine partners. Every answer to those questions was provisional and subject to revision.
News coverage, when Diyala got any, was organized around events — an attack, a casualty figure, an operation announcement. What it couldn't capture was the texture of operating there during that period: the way threat assessment was constant and imprecise. The way a route that was clean yesterday might not be today. The way the population gave you information in fragments, partial, often deliberately so, because their survival calculations were different from yours. The way a day could be profoundly boring and then instantly not, with nothing gradual between those states.
The agricultural terrain — especially during the orange harvest, when the trees were thick — created line-of-sight problems that the urban warfare doctrine didn't fully address. You cleared a tree line and then you cleared it again. The IED threat in Diyala during this period was sophisticated. EFPs were particularly dangerous — cylindrical charges using a copper plate that would form into a molten jet on detonation, capable of penetrating the armor on uparmored HMMWVs. They were often placed in roadside debris, in guardrails, in apparently ordinary features of the landscape.
The people of Baqubah — the civilians, the families — were navigating something genuinely impossible. AQI would kill you for cooperating with Americans. Americans couldn't protect you twenty-four hours a day, and AQI would know that. The calculations those people were making, every day, about who to talk to and what to say and how to get their kids to school and whether the market was safe enough today — that calculus is not something that gets adequately reported. It's not dramatic enough for a news cycle, and it's too human and too granular to fit into a policy debate.
By the summer of 2007, the surge was underway and Baqubah was chosen as one of its early focal points. Operation Arrowhead Ripper, launched in June 2007, was led by 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, and involved multiple coalition and Iraqi units in a concerted push to clear AQI from Baqubah and surrounding areas.
The operation was intense and costly — both sides sustained significant casualties in close urban fighting. AQI had fortified positions, placed IEDs throughout the city, and in some cases used civilian homes as fighting positions. The clearing process was methodical and slow by necessity: moving too fast risked IEDs, and every structure required careful approach.
The operation succeeded in significantly disrupting AQI's Baqubah network, but "success" in counterinsurgency is not a permanent condition. Clearing an area and holding it are different problems, and holding it required sustained presence and the gradual re-establishment of functioning governance and local security — a process measured in years, not weeks.
One of the significant developments of the 2006–2007 period — accelerating through 2008 — was the Anbar Awakening's spread into Diyala. The Awakening was a movement of Sunni tribal leaders who had, for various reasons (AQI overreach, alienating local customs, economic incentives, American outreach), turned against AQI and began working with coalition forces against them.
This changed the operational landscape materially. Intelligence improved dramatically when tribal leaders were providing it. AQI's ability to move freely through Sunni areas diminished. The Concerned Local Citizens (later Sons of Iraq) program formalized this relationship, paying tribal members to man checkpoints and report insurgent activity.
The Awakening is often described as if it were primarily an American-managed process. The truth is more complex. The tribal leaders who led it took enormous personal risks, and many of them died for it. The movement was driven as much by Sunni communities' own revulsion at AQI's brutality and cultural overreach as by anything coalition forces offered. It was a partnership — real, functional, and ultimately significant — but one that had Iraqi agency at its center.
American casualties in Diyala Province during this period were real and significant, and they have their own memorial weight. But the American casualty count is a small fraction of the total human cost of what happened in Diyala in 2006 and 2007. The Iraqi civilian deaths — from AQI attacks, from sectarian violence, from displacement, from the disruption of basic services and economic life — numbered in the thousands for the province alone. The families displaced, the communities that were essentially destroyed, the trauma that continues to affect that region today: these are the consequences that are hardest to quantify and easiest to forget.
The standard retrospective debates about the Iraq War — should we have gone, was the surge worth it, who won — tend to flatten the specific human reality of what happened in places like Diyala Province into policy arguments. Both the arguments and the reality matter, but they're not the same thing.
What should be remembered:
History is always being simplified for consumption. The simplification is necessary for communication, but something important is lost in every compression. What I can offer is texture. Partial, personal, shaped by where I stood and what I could see. It's not the whole picture — no one person's account ever is. But it's real, and it happened, and it deserves to be said while the people who were there can still say it.