Friend and foe blurred on urban streets

With fear in his face and a white flag of surrender in his hand, Majid Hamid approached the US Marines' position.

Within seconds, marines of the 1st light armored reconnaissance (LAR) company had wrestled Mr. Hamid to the ground, taken away his T-shirt flag, and cuffed his hands.

The good news for Hamid, on these Fallujah streets of raw violence: He wasn't shot.

Drawing the line between friend and foe is extremely difficult in this urban battlefield. Insurgents may appear in civilian garb or the uniform of the Iraqi National Guard fighting alongside US troops. And the magnitude of violence - from heavy US air and artillery strikes against rebels, to the kidnappings, murders, and car bombs favored by terrorist cells - means that civilians are often caught in a web of suspicion.

Armored US Army and Marine infantry units are consolidating new gains in south Fallujah, while elements north of the highway that bisects the city east to west continue to hunt down tenacious bands of rebels. The military says the city is now occupied, though not yet subdued.

The Marine commander in charge of planning the assault said that more than 1,200 insurgents have died - a figure that barely seems possible, at least given the experience here in the northeast sector. In a week, this reporter saw the bodies of 25 insurgents and about a dozen live civilians.

Commanders on the ground say such metrics of success don't apply to Fallujah, yet.

"We have crushed their command and control, but these guys are patient," says Capt. Gil Juarez, the LAR company commander, who seized his rifle and took part himself in a gun battle with four insurgents that broke out 100 yards away from his command post Saturday.

Marines used a TOW missile and rifle fire to smoke them out, and later sent foot patrols to sweep the area. No rebels were found.

"We need to keep them off balance, the pressure on, and then rebuild this city," says Captain Juarez, from San Diego, Calif. "We're making progress, [but] Iraqi forces don't control the city, and that's the final objective.... There is still a lot of work that needs to be done."

Meanwhile, insurgents continued to show strength in Iraq's third largest city, Mosul, by overrunning a police station there Sunday. Last week, rebels seized at least nine stations and took over neighborhoods. Some local police defected, others fled, before Iraqi and US military forces arrived to restore order.

The fighting in Fallujah has left the city a ghost town. The few people venturing into the streets are viewed through rifle sights first as potential enemies, and second as innocents.

US and Iraqi forces have made clear - with leaflet drops, radio broadcasts, and psychological operations teams with loudspeakers mounted on Humvees - that the way to stay alive in Fallujah is to keep indoors, or "surrender" with a white flag.

Mr. Hamid, the frightened, mustachioed Iraqi of military age, followed those instructions when he surrendered.

Besides his white flag, Hamid bore a handwritten letter in English, written by his father, explaining that he had moved the rest of his family out of Fallujah, and left Hamid to "safeguard the house. I hope [you] treat him kindly, if [you] happen to see him."

He also carried a mobile phone, and a card showing him to be a student at the Al-Rasheed College of Engineering and Science. After five or six days, he said, he had run out of food and water. A neighbor also wanted to turn himself in, to be safer.

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