Balad ruz is the named town on this image but look at the rivers. The one on the right goes up to Baquba/Sammarra/Tikrit (Tigris) the one on the left to Syria (Euphrates). The dark area below the two lakes in the middle is Bagdad and around it in a 65 mile radius are all the cities you keep hearing about. The mountain range is the Turkish border in the upper middle and Iranian Border to the right. Diyala Province contains Balad ruz, population listed as 5700 but that is way off if you take a five mile radius of the area I counted 800 homes in satellite photos (a few blocks) sitting in the TOC on midnight shift once, and that was not near all of them. 800 times three is 2400 and that was only a few blocks and one photo. Three people per house is also a low ball number most had 6-12 or more. In the Doug Grindle interviews the sergeants that worked in town all year state that the population was over 85,000. The area of operations was huge for Apache and bigger for Deacon. I use Okinawa Japan at 485 square miles as an example, ours was like 1500 hundred square miles. The land runs downhill from the mountains and towards the Persian Gulf.
