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Iraqi forces backed by US troops have launched a major assault against fighters in the northeastern province of Diyala.
"The operation began in Diyala early this morning and we have begun raids in some neighbourhoods of the city of Baquba," Ragib al-Omeiri, chief of the operations bureau in Baquba, said on Tuesday.
"Iraqi police and Iraqi army are working together with the US army," he told the AFP news agency.
The operations were planned and executed by Iraqi forces, with US troops taking on a secondary role, Major John Hall, US army spokesman, said in an email to the AFP news agency.
"The goal of the operation is to seek out and destroy criminal elements and terrorist threats in Diyala and eliminate smuggling corridors in the surrounding area."
Major General Abdul Karim Khalaf, the interior ministry spokesman, had announced on July 13 that the Iraqi military would launch an assault on Diyala.
Earlier this month the US military said a force of 30,000 Iraqi soldiers and police were amassing in Diyala and its capital Baquba, an area where fighters regularly carry out attacks.
Aided by the US military and Iraqi forces, local anti-al-Qaeda groups known as Sahwa, or Awakening councils, have inflicted severe blows on the fighters but they continue to wage attacks in the region.
Several recent strikes have been carried out by female suicide bombers, with one woman killing eight people when she blew herself up as a Sahwa patrol passed by in Baquba last week.
Awakening groups began in the western province of Anbar when Sunni tribal leaders turned on their former al-Qaeda allies in 2006, and since then similar bodies have sprung up across Iraq, supported and paid for by the US military.
'Most dangerous province."
On July 7, another female bomber killed two people and wounded 14 others after blowing herself up at a bustling street market in Baquba, while in June another woman killed 16 people near Baquba.
Mohammed al-Asskri, a defence ministry spokesman, told the AFP news agency that the security operations codenamed "Glad Tidings" would specifically target al-Qaeda operatives and other outlaws.
Colonel Ali al-Karkhi, commanding officer of Iraqi forces in Khan Beni Saad, a town near Baquba, said in an interview with the AFP news agency last week that "Diyala remains the most dangerous province in Iraq".
"It is a mini-Iraq. There are Sunnis, Shia, Kurds, Christians," he said.
The US military also believes that many fighters in the area are "rogue" members of the Shia Mahdi Army militia of Moqtada al-Sadr.
Diyala, fed by the Euphrates and Diyala rivers, was once the granary of Iraq and the country's orange capital with its lush orchards.
PHOTO CAPTION:
Iraq map
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