As a sign of respect, US Marine Capt. Jeff Stevenson took off his dark sunglasses and helmet to meet the Iraqi top brass.

At the Fallujah railway station Tuesday - a flash point of insurgent fighting until a few days ago - the company commander received 30 Iraqi troops, members of the Iraq Civil Defense Corps (ICDC), to man the position jointly. The preplanned deal was finalized as Captain Stevenson and his Iraqi counterpart sat on a dust-covered marble bench in the station's waiting room.

"Outstanding," Stevenson told his counterpart as he heard the plan for controlling the main railway building. Marines would keep gun emplacements on either flank, a step toward handing Iraqis security control of Fallujah. By nightfall, those ICDC soldiers were patroling by foot along the main road in front of the station.

"I'm really looking forward to your forces and my forces working together," said Stevenson, of the 2nd Battalion 1st Marine Regiment, from Oceanside, Calif.

"God willing," nodded Capt. Saleh Khalaf Farhan, leaning into his handshake. "Guys, drop [your guns] down, push back," Stevenson told marines as the Iraqis filed in, holding an eclectic mix of assault and bolt-action rifles.

For US military commanders in Iraq, finding a solution to a month of violence here that has cost some 100 American and 600 Iraqi lives is crucial to overcoming dogged security problems.

On trial now are plans to put Iraqi forces - in one case, elements of former Iraqi units, led by a Hussein-era general - in control, as the US Marines shift back their positions, maintaining the cordon only in Fallujah's troubled northwest sector. US commandershope that the new force can bring calm to a city that has been in turmoil since the killing of four US security contractors March 31 prompted US offensive operations.

"I'm excited to see these guys," says Lt. Col. Gregg Olson, battalion commander of 2-1. "My orders are to integrate these folks, and we're putting an Iraqi and American face on security here."

Gen. Mohammed Latif, the overall commander of Iraqi forces in Fallujah, said deploying Iraqis here "is the last step to removing all the positions of Americans from Fallujah."

To ensure there were "no mistakes," he told Stevenson, it was critical that "we put Iraqi soldiers at the front, and your soldiers behind." General Latif said he was deploying 150 troops Tuesday at several northern positions, and had plans for 1,000 others in "fixed positions" in the north and south of the city.

"We have succeeded 100 percent," said Latif. "Fallujah is now safer than Baghdad."

The marines say they will wait and see. Though reports from journalists in Fallujah Tuesday indicated that insurgents - ubiquitous recently as they celebrated the Marine pullback - are now barely visible, few think they are gone.

Monday morning, for example, marines here had packed up but hadn't even left the parking lot of the railway station when Iraqis began moving across a swath of noman's land from the edge of the city to the station toward the abandoned US frontline posts.

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