Civil war is raging through the Iraqi countryside.

Sunni insurgents have largely taken control of the province of Diyala, where local leaders believe the insurgents are close to establishing a 'Taleban republic'. Officials in the strategically important, mixed Sunni and Shia province with a Kurdish minority, have no doubt about what is happening.

Lt Col Ahmed Ahmed Nuri Hassan, a weary looking commander of the federal police, says: "Now there is an ethnic civil war and it is getting worse every day."

At the moment the Sunni seem to be winning it. As the violence has escalated in Iraq over the past three years it has become too dangerous for journalists to find out what is happening in the provinces outside the capital.

The UN said last week that 5106 civilians were killed in Baghdad in July and August and 1493 in the provinces outside it.

Insurgents have cut the roads out of the capital to the west and the north.

As I travelled through the provinces of this vast, war-torn country, despite keeping to the relatively calm tongue of Kurdish territory that extends through the countryside almost to Baghdad, I was keenly aware that it is not a place to make a mistake in map reading.

We drove for a couple of hours beside the Diyala river which rises in Iran's Zagros mountains and looks like a smaller version of the Nile, a streak of vivid green vegetation running through dun-coloured semi-desert.

Then we turned abruptly east before the road entered the strongly insurgent district of As-Sadiyah.

What could have happened if we had continued down the main road was evident at Col Hassan's headquarters.

In one corner of the courtyard was the wreckage of a blue-and-white police land rover, ripped apart by a bomb.

"Five policemen were killed in it when it was blown up at an intersection in As-Sadiyah two months ago," a policeman told us. "Only their commander survived but both his legs were amputated."

In Diyala it is possible to see the anguished break up of Iraq at ground level.

Going by the accounts of police and government officials in the province given to the Independent the death toll outside Baghdad may be far higher than previously reported.

Ibrahim Hassan Bajalan, the head of Diyala provincial council who had survived an attempt to assassinate him in Baquba with a mortar attack the previous day, says he believed that "on average 100 people are being killed in Diyala every week."