Baquba, Iraq  - It is election season in Baquba, the capital of Iraq's volatile and ethnically mixed Diyala province, and formerly one of the main battlefields in the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The streets are festooned with posters and stickers, often in layers, as political partisans rip competitors' posters down and replace them with their own.

Candidates make speeches, bestow gifts, and listen to the voters at gatherings around the city.

Six hundred candidates are running for 29 seats in Baquba's local government. More than 500 voting centres have been set up to accommodate what election officials hope will be record participation.

"Baquba has election fever. This election is all people can talk about at home, in the street, and in schools. People are hoping for wide participation," Ahmed Mohammed, a 37-year-old factory worker from Baquba, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

"Every day, people here harangue their friends and family to vote. We have never seen anything like this before," he added.

Faced with such enthusiasm, a stranger might be forgiven for thinking Baquba had shrugged off its reputation as an al-Qaeda stronghold and was on its way to reclaiming its traditional reputation for orange and lemon groves.

However, many here say some of the candidates running for elected office are the same people who just last year were organising lethal bomb attacks against civilians.

The ubiquitous presence of Iraqi security forces and al-Sahwa (or "Awakening") militias enticed to give up fighting by money, guns, and temporary positions in the Interior Ministry has helped make January one of the quietest months Baquba has seen in recent memory.

Suicide bombings used to be regular occurrences here. Just last November, for example, a 13-year-old girl killed herself and five others when she detonated a belt of explosives strapped to her body as she passed a security patrol.

Attacks and threats forced thousands of families to flee their homes in Baquba, but now that security has improved, a few are returning.

"Violence has decreased to a large extent. The police force now has control over 90 percent of Baquba's neighbourhoods," Major General Abdel-Hussein al-Sahmri, head of Baquba's police force, told dpa.

"We also have plans to attack the terrorist groups at home, and to secure the return of those displaced by the fighting to their homes," he said.

Those who have returned have not always found a warm welcome.

Saja Qadouri, a member of Baquba's Security Committee, told dpa that "a number of displaced families returning home are being targeted by the terrorist groups in order to prevent them from participating in the elections."

Worse, she said, those targeting them now are in some cases seeking to represent them in the provincial council.

"Judicial authorities have issued 15 arrest warrants concerning a number of some political blocs' candidates. They face charges of involvement in crimes such as murder, forcing families to flee, and for connections with armed militias, especially al-Qaeda in Iraq," she said.

Taha Dera, a United Iraqi Alliance MP representing Baquba, told dpa: "There are real concerns that some candidates who were involved in violence ... could win the election. That is a dangerous situation."

For the moment, the participation of former insurgents in politics, and, via the Awakening Councils, in security, seems to have contributed to the calm.

Saleh al-Mutlaq, the leader of the National Dialogue Council, Iraq's second-largest Sunni party, and the man most often credited with convincing many tribal leaders to join the Awakening Councils, told dpa that he was convinced that "political action is the only recourse to returning Iraq to a state of health."

But this is a fragile state of affairs, Nabil Mohammed Salim, a professor of political science at Baghdad University told dpa.

"Security will collapse if anything happens, if the elections bring the same people to power. If the parties and candidates now participating in the process do not accept the results, they may return to violence," he said.

"In Diyala, most of the people in power in the army are with the Peshmerga (Kurdish militia)," Salim said. "They take their orders from the Kurdish parties, not from the central government. There has been lots of fighting between Arabs and Kurds within the army already."

"Is it possible that the army could interfere in the process in flash-points like Diyala and Nineveh? Yes, certainly, that is a worry," one Western diplomat told dpa, speaking on condition of anonymity. (dpa)