The occupation force announced it was halting offensive operations in the flashpoint Iraqi city of Fallujah on Monday under an agreement that will end a two-week siege by United States marines following the killing of four American contractors.

The occupation said its troops would start joint patrols with Iraqi security forces following several days of talks with leaders in the Sunni Muslim insurgent bastion.

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The agreement also reiterated the need to restore law and order with the police and paramilitary forces being reformed as a matter of urgency.

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The agreement also reiterated the need to restore law and order with the police and paramilitary forces being reformed as a matter of urgency.

The investigation into the killing and mutilation of the four US contractors last month and an attack on a police station in March will be carried out by local police.

The American government had previously demanded the handover of the killers as part of any solution to the bloody standoff in the city west of Baghdad that has become a byword for anti-American resistance.

"Why do you keep asking about the closing of the Fallujah hospital?" my Iraqi translator asks in exasperation. I explain that this is big news, and it hasn't really been reported in English. He looks at me, incredulous; all Iraqis know about it.

When the United States began the siege of Fallujah, it targeted civilians in several ways. The power station was bombed; perhaps even more important, the bridge across the Euphrates was closed. Fallujah's main hospital stands on the western bank of the river; almost the entirety of the town is on the east side. Although the hospital was not technically closed, no doctor who actually believes in the Hippocratic oath is going to sit in an empty hospital while people are dying in droves on the other bank of the river. So the doctors shut down the hospital, took the limited supplies and equipment they could carry, and started working at a small three-room outpatient clinic, doing operations on the ground and losing patients because of the inadequacy of the setup. This event was not reported in English until April 14, when the bridge was reopened.

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There are also persistent claims that after an outbreak of hostilities American soldiers visit hospitals asking for information about the wounded, with the intent of removing potential resistance members and interrogating them. Nomaan Hospital in Aadhamiyah and Yarmouk Hospital in Yarmouk (both areas of Baghdad) got visits from U.S. forces in the first days after the fighting in Fallujah started -- the lion's share of evacuated wounded from Fallujah were taken to those two hospitals. Doctors generally resist being turned into informants for the occupation; one doctor actually told me that he has many times discharged people straight from the emergency room, with inadequate time to recuperate, just to keep them out of military custody. As he said, "They are my countrymen. How can I hold them for the Americans?"

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By any reasonable standard, these hospital closings (and, of course, the shooting at ambulances) are war crimes. However afraid the Plus Ultra garrison may have been of attack from the rooftops, they didn't have to close the hospital; they could simply have screened entrants. In the case of Fallujah, it's clear that one of the reasons the mujahideen were willing to talk about ceasefire was to get the hospital open again; in effect, the United States was holding civilians (indirectly) hostage for military ends.

After an earlier article about attacks on ambulances, many people wrote to ask why U.S. forces would do this -- it conflicted with the image they wanted to have of the U.S. military. Were they just trying to massacre civilians? And, if so, why?

In fact, it's fairly simple: the United States has its military goals and simply does not care how many Iraqi civilians have to be killed in order to maximize the military efficiency of their operations. A senior British army commander recently criticized the Americans for viewing the Iraqis as Untermenschen -- a lower order of human being. He also said the average soldier views all Iraqis as enemies or potential enemies. That is precisely the case. I have heard the same thing from dozens of people here -- "They don't care what happens to Iraqis."

Although this relatively indiscriminate killing of civilians may serve American military ends -- keeping the ratio of enemy dead to American soldiers dead as high as possible -- in terms of political ends, it is a disaster. It is very difficult to explain to an Iraqi that a man fighting from his own town with a Kalashnikov or RPG launcher is a "coward" and a "war criminal" (because, apparently, he should go out into the desert and wait to be annihilated from the sky) but that someone dropping 2000-pound bombs on residential areas or shooting at ambulances because they may have guns in them (even though they usually don't) is a hero and is following the laws of war.

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Before, the occupation might have succeeded -- not in building real democracy, which was never the goal, but in cementing U.S. control of Iraq. It cannot succeed now. The resistance in Fallujah will be beaten down, with the commission of more war crimes; if the United States invades Najaf, it will be able to win militarily there as well. But from now on, no military victory will make Iraqis stop resisting.

In the intensive care unit at Medical City hospital in Baghdad Yusuf Fayar Ali said his son Mohammad, 12, was shot through the mouth when troops attacked gunmen in his village, al-Na'amiya just south of Falluja, last week. The boy, seriously ill, is on a ventilator.

"The fighting lasted for an hour and we tried to take our women and children away out of the house," he said.

"We were hiding in the trees by the Euphrates. My son was hiding in a small furrow between the trees. He lifted up his head and suddenly a bullet hit him through the cheek. I am sure it was an American bullet."

In the next bed a young girl called Iftihal has a bullet lodged inside her skull. She was injured in the same attack when US troops crossed the river to her village, Amariya.

"The Americans were just shooting, there was no specific target," her father Ismail Obaid, 51, said. "We were inside the house - the bullet came through the door and hit her in the head."

"The Americans came to our area and were shooting randomly and that is why a lot of civilians were injured," he said.

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A surgeon who spent five days helping treat the injured in Falluja last week said he had seen dozens of injured women and children.

"We had a clinic with two operating rooms. It was the worst place in Iraq to deal with a patient," said the doctor. He was too frightened to give his name.


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He said the civilian casualties began to decrease after the first week, because many families left the city when the ceasefire began.

The moves on Fallujah, which Marines besieged two weeks ago, and especially on Najaf, where anti-American Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr has taken refuge, are pushing many Iraqis to choose sides between the occupation force and other Iraqis. Enduring religious animosities have been put aside as the more radical Sunnis and Shiites join to fight a new common enemy: the United States.

"If we force them to choose, they will choose their own," said a senior official in the U.S.-led coalition.

Although the military situation calmed last week, the reality on the ground was, if anything, more disturbing than the week before.

For foreigners -- troops, diplomats, contractors rebuilding the country, and journalists -- kidnappings became a daily occurrence. Shootings of people who look non-Arab -- regardless of whether they were Western, Asian or African -- became routine.

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In some measure, the violence against Westerners is viewed as retribution for the violence in Fallujah. Whether that is true or not, belief that Americans behaved as barbarians and that thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead is widespread. According to Arab custom and especially tribal tradition, they should be avenged.

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"Now all the people, even the most ignorant, believe the only solution is resistance. The Americans are killing children, destroying homes, killing women," said Sheik Bilal Habashi, who runs a mosque in a Sunni-dominated neighborhood of Baghdad, near the road to Fallujah.

"The Americans want to enter Fallujah as invaders. When an invader wants to enter a city, the people start defending their city, even the women," he said.

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There is less violence in Fallujah now as well, but the city remains tense. No one believes the trouble is over. The U.S. is determined to root out the fighters, and it is clear that hundreds -- if not a couple of thousand -- are still there.

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Bessam Jarrah is a slight, soft-spoken man who is willing to criticize violence by Iraqis. A general surgeon, he has spent much of the last two weeks coordinating efforts of the Islamic League of Medical Professionals, which has been sending volunteer physicians to treat the wounded in Fallouja. He had high hopes for the U.S. role in Iraq, but they have drained away.

"In the first months of the occupation, we, the educated people, thought America would show us a humanitarian way, a political way, to solve problems," Jarrah said. "But this use of force means the efforts to find a political solution for Iraq has failed, and now America is using Saddam's approach to problems: brute force.

"America won the war on April 9 last year; they lost the war on April 9 this year. That is what Iraqis feel."