RAMADI (Iraq): Crouched around the camera’s high-tech screen, the US Marines watch as flames burn the camouflage netting around one of their lookout posts on a nearby roof, just hit by a burst of machinegun fire.

As the camera in the troops’ command position sweeps the area around the post 500 metres away, all that can be seen are mothers taking children to school.

The insurgents have vanished, having poured around 400 heavy machine gun bullets into the rooftop lookout, piercing the protective ballistic glass and wounding the soldier on duty.

Only two hours earlier the same Marines had been congratulating themselves on spotting a group of insurgents burying a roadside bomb, now all wiped out in an aerial strike the troops called up.

Here in Ramadi, capital of Al-Anbar province and heartland of the Sunni insurrection in Iraq, a war of attrition is taking place.

Faced with daily harassment by insurgents in this city 100 kilometres west of Baghdad, the Marines are steadily setting up advance posts as they move cautiously towards the zones most occupied by their Sunni attackers.

“The battalion is moving east, where the danger comes from. Building observation posts denies freedom of movement for the enemy,” said Captain Kyle Sloan, Alpha company commander.

Sloan says the Marines are carrying out more daytime patrols while the Iraqi police were now able to operate independently.

The Marines company command headquarters in Ramadi, a four-storey building, also shelters some 50 Iraqi police and around 30 soldiers from the Iraqi army.

“When they told me I have to go to Ramadi, I told myself ‘this is not good’, but now I believe it is better here than in Baghdad”, said Alaa Mohammed, one of the Iraqi soldiers.To one side of the post, a school has reopened, and Marines say that more people are daring to venture out into the streets and that their attitude towards the Americans has changed for the better.

“Every squad has a favourite family. When on patrol, they are making a point of going to the house, see if they need anything, give stuff to the kids,” said Corporal Joshua Barrett.

It’s not a strategy that endears the US troops to everyone in Ramadi.

During a night patrol to secure buildings around a new advance post, Lieutenant Michael Steinpfad asked local residents: “Why do you let the insurgents live with you?” One young man, a local Sunni, speaking in English, challenged the US view.

“The insurgents treat us badly and the Americans treat us badly too. We are afraid the Americans came to steal the oil and fortunes of Iraq. Saddam Hussein gave Iraq an important thing, security,” he said.

Illustrating the divisions tearing the country apart, an angry Shia interpreter from southern Iraq working with the US military, retorted: “Do you think Saddam didn’t steal Iraqi fortunes? Why don’t you cooperate?

“Under his regime, it was a fake security, he was killing people. The same terrorists that are killing people now were already killing people then,” said the interpreter.

Perhaps fearing he had gone too far, the young Sunni remained quiet.—AFP