In Darfur, From Genocide to Anarchy - Washington Post, 28 Aug.

Imagine you are a U.S. Special Forces officer and you get a call: You are being posted to Darfur. Your job is to protect African villagers from marauding Arab horsemen and to show the Sudanese security chiefs that their bluff has been called -- at last, the international community is standing up to their evil schemes.

What can you expect? According to news reports, a sort of slow-motion Rwanda in the desert. What will you find on arrival? A reality that's complicated and messy. A Darfur that has more in common with Chad, southern Sudan and -- dare we say it? -- Somalia.

In Darfur today, knowing who is on which side is not straightforward. The savage counterinsurgency offensives, with their massacres and scorched earth, that Colin Powell called "genocide" in September 2004 had in fact largely concluded by the time Powell made that historic determination. This isn't a moral exculpation; it's simply a fact. It's also been a regular sequence in Sudan's recurrent wars over the past 25 years. Episodes of intense brutality and mass displacement are followed by longer periods of anarchic internecine fighting, ably exploited by the government.

Because the vanguard of government offensives is tribal paramilitaries -- well known to prefer soft civilian targets to hardened rebels -- the result of each offensive is a fractured and demoralized society in which every group is armed and most leaders cut opportunistic alliances to preserve their power bases. The warlords who prosper in this environment deal only in the currency of power, switching alliances as their calculus shifts ...
Sounds like ... Diyala?