As Yassir Harhoush sees it, the work he'll be doing for the new U.S.-sanctioned Fallouja Brigade isn't all that different from what he was doing last week - only then, he says, he was part of the insurgency.

"I was fighting the Americans," Harhoush, a 28-year-old former soldier in Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, said Friday afternoon. "I have not stopped. This is just a temporary truce. If the Americans attack, we will defend ourselves again."

...

"Now the Americans are on the outskirts, but in two days they should be completely gone," said Col. Nafaa Kurdi Hais, who stopped by to see how his new troops were doing.

"If they betray us, the battle will be renewed," he said, noting matter-of-factly that just a week ago he too had been fighting the Americans. "We were all defending our city�. If the resistance was limited, the Americans could have easily overcome us."

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Hais, like others, discounted the U.S. military's assertion that many foreign fighters were involved in the Fallouja confrontations, nodding as his second lieutenant, Omar Mohammed Ubaidi, said: "There were no foreign fighters. Maybe there were some Arab citizens living in Iraq for a long time, some have even taken Iraqi wives, and maybe they chose to participate."

In any case, the force has no obligation to hunt down foreign fighters, Ubaidi said - a view that appears to differ from that of the Marines.