AL-UDAIM DESERT, Iraq (AFP) — Wrecks of old vehicles. Passing Bedouins herding emaciated goats. And as far as the eye can see, a dusty, beige, lunar landscape.
The Al-Udaim desert is one of the last refuges in Iraq of Al-Qaeda fighters, who the US army and Iraqi authorities say are increasingly on the defensive.
Around 60 kilometres (35 miles) north of Baghdad, this immense stretch of arid earth blasted by scorching winds is strategic territory for Al-Qaeda, the group the United States blames for the majority of the brutal violence in Iraq.
The desert links the two main jihadist battlegrounds in Iraq -- the troubled province of Diyala in the east and the Sunni stronghold of Dhuluiyah in the west, on the way to the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul.
"They are finished, period. The ones who haven't been killed are in disarray. The last ones are wandering hungry in the desert," Colonel Mohammed Khaled Abdelhamid, chief of police in Dhuluiyah, told AFP.
The "Arab" fighters, a reference to the non-Iraqi fighters who spread terror in the region and have assassinated hundreds of civilians, have gone away, Abdelhamid says.
Their local supporters, once very numerous, are keeping quiet, waiting for better days.
"The only one left is him", the police chief said, calling up on his mobile phone a picture of a smiling 30-year old in Arab head-dress -- Khaled Habib al-Juburi, the last local Al-Qaeda leader known to be still alive.
A visit to Al-Udaim still involves an impressive escort of around a dozen Hummer vehicles, each crowned with a 14.5 mm machine gun.
Only two months ago, however, the district was completely inaccessible. Al-Qaeda fighters had made it their holiday camp, a little "caliphate" serving as a rest and recuperation centre, though many of their victims ended up abandoned to the vultures.
The arrival in Dhuluiyah at the end of 2007 of Sahwa (Awakening) militias, former insurgents who had switched loyalties, gradually pushed the jihadists from the town. They then took refuge in nearby villages, on the edge of Al-Udaim desert.
From there, they continued their attacks, sending suicide volunteers out in booby trapped cars to blow themselves up at Sahwas barriers.
In August, seeking a general improvement in security in Dhuluiyah, the Iraqi army deployed extensively in the villages, pushing the Al-Qaeda fighters further and further into the desert.
Since then, Al-Qaeda has not carried out any operation or sizeable attack in Dhuluiyah. Along the road from the farming villages to the first sands of the desert, farmsteads with machine-gunned walls are returning to life.
Farmers are busy in palm groves. Women cut brush in previously-abandoned fields. Girls in school uniform and navy blue hijabs walk by in orderly lines.
A last barrier, a clump of dead trees, then around the corner the desert begins. A place of dust, weeds, and alongside the track, heaps of charred metal, the remains of bombed out vehicles.
Amid this desolate landscape, occasional Bedouin families scrape a living in miserable brick houses amid their scraggy goats.
"The last time I saw men from Al-Qaeda go by was two months ago," said Salah Saif Iasem, his tanned skin contrasting with the immaculate white of his dishdasha robe.
"They leave us in peace," the Bedouin added. Have the jihadists really been "wiped out" as the authorities claim? "I don't think they've gone very far..."
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