“Many areas in Diyala have undergone what is best described as ethnic or sectarian cleansing,” says Wathiq al-Dulaimi, a Sunni political activist. “There have been systematic killings and retaliatory operations. For instance there’s been a major campaign to demolish houses in Jalawla and Saadia."
Locals believe that the demographic change the province is undergoing is also linked to political games being played. The governor of the province, Amer al-Majmai, was voted out of office after being accused of corruption. Now Muthana al-Tamimi, a Diyala politician who is also a senior member of the Shiite-Muslim group, the Badr organization, is governor – he was elected to the position only a few hours after al-Majmai was expelled.
As Iraqi analyst Kirk Sowell points out in a post for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:
“This is controversial because Diyala is, or at least has been, a majority Sunni Arab province. The 2013 provincial elections resulted in a 29-seat council with fourteen Sunni Arabs, twelve Shia, and three Kurds. The Kurds’ alliance with the main Sunni coalition allowed the election of a Sunni Arab as governor in 2013, but the war has since driven the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the dominant Kurdish party in northern Diyala, closer to Iran. Tamimi’s election was the fruit of this renewed Shia-Kurd alliance.”
It seems unlikely that anything will change soon in Diyala. The federal authorities are unlikely to pay any attention to the ongoing sectarian and ethnic infighting because their focus is mostly on getting rid of the extremist IS group and they do not seem to have a strong strategy for what to do with disrupted and insecure areas after the extremists have been driven out.
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