Diyala is traditionally home to both Sunni and Shiite Muslims as well as Kurds. According to the most recent data, which is several years old, the province was just over half Sunni Muslim, with one third Shiite Muslim and the rest Kurdish.
And as the expert Iraqi website, Musings on Iraq, noted recently, Diyala has long been a battleground for the various ethnic and religious factions, including Shiite militias, Sunni groups linked with, first, Al Qaeda and then the Islamic State, or IS, group, and the Iraqi Kurdish forces here.
“The only solution to all of these problems is Article 140 of the Iraqi Constitution,” suggests Anwar Hussain, the mayor of Jalawla; Article 140 is intended to help resolve issues with Iraq’s “disputed territories”. These are areas that the Iraqi Kurdish say should belong to their semi-autonomous region but which the federal government believes belong to Iraq proper. “This would mean a referendum that would decide whether Diyala should be part of Iraqi Kurdistan or a province that is part of federal Iraq, or whether it might become an independent entity.”
In an oft repeated accusation – that the country’s Kurds are using the security crisis to advance their own ambitions for independence from Baghdad - other locals say that the Iraqi Kurdish military are taking advantage of the chaos in Diyala to try and empty certain areas of their Arab population. Jalawla is almost empty of Arabs, they point out.
“These events in Diyala are to be expected,” says Iraqi MP, Jamal al- Karbouli, a Sunni Muslim and head of the National Movement for Reform and Development, or Al Hal, party. “The events only confirm that the alliance between Iraq’s Shiites and the Iraqi Kurdish is becoming stronger. And it is going to lead to the ongoing marginalization of Sunnis, as well as their exclusion from the local government.”
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