With two US Marines standing by his side, Salam Ibrahim, a captain in the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, declared yesterday that he was ready to patrol Iraq's most dangerous city alongside American troops.
''I trust them," he said. ''If I am asked to do any duty inside Fallujah, I will do it."
But when the Marines walked away, Ibrahim reversed his position.
''If people see us walking with the Marines, the mujahideen," holy warriors, ''will do one of two things," he said as he helped the Marines operate a checkpoint at the edge of the city. ''Either they will wait for us at our homes and shoot us. Or they will shoot us when we're with the Marines. We want the Marines to leave and let us take care of the city."
Marines and Iraqi security forces are supposed to begin joint patrols in Fallujah tomorrow, less than a month after most of the city's police and Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, or ICDC, fled their posts as insurgents battled Marines.
As President Bush weighs whether to launch an all-out attack on Fallujah, possibly within days, hopes for a peaceful end to the standoff in the area lean heavily on the joint patrols. If they succeeded in taming the city, they could save face for local leaders, allow Americans to say they were invited into Fallujah, and strengthen Iraq's wobbly security forces.
But yesterday, Marines and Iraqi civil defense troops alike questioned whether Iraqi patrolmen would show up in large numbers tomorrow morning, let alone stand with Marines against insurgents that US military officials call a mix of foreign fighters, Islamists, and Iraqis angry at the yearlong US-led occupation.
''The police always want to show that they're not on patrol with you because they want to be. They want to look like they just got drug along," said Lieutenant Matt Hogan of Billerica, whose joint patrols with police in western Iraq ended abruptly April 8, when a corporal was killed in an ambush near a police station. A machine gun similar to one used in the ambush was found missing from the station, and the Marines arrested several police.
One US military officer here at Camp Fallujah, Marine headquarters in Iraq, said the joint patrols could end up providing political cover for a Marine push into downtown Fallujah: The patrols will probably be attacked, he said, requiring a larger Marine force to rescue them.
US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the top military spokesman in Iraq, said yesterday in Baghdad, ''We've got to be very careful with those joint patrols walking into Fallujah, that they're not going into a trap."
He said the patrols were a sign of progress, but added, ''Patience is not infinite, and if we see foot-dragging, if we see a slowdown, if we see a lack of adherence to some of the terms that have been set up, we certainly have more than sufficient military capability. A renewed US assault in Fallujah could inflame Iraqi anger against the occupation. It could also worsen security problems that are posing challenges to the hand-off of sovereignty planned for June 30.
Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy helping to choose the transitional government, urged the United States in an interview taped Friday to ''Tread carefully" in Fallujah.
''If you have enemies there, this is exactly what they want you to do, to alienate more people so that more people support them rather than you," he said on ABC's ''This Week."
Marines surrounded Fallujah early this month amid fierce fighting, then paused their offensive to allow for negotiations. Last week, the top Marine commander in Iraq said Fallujah leaders were not delivering on promises to rein in the guerrillas, and threatened to launch a full-scale offensive unless insurgents hand over heavy weapons within days.
Over the weekend, US officials pursued two parallel tracks. Bush conferred by satellite phone with top generals in Fallujah as more Marine units readied for a possible mission. At the same time, military commanders stressed that they are ready to work with most Fallujah residents and want to avoid a bloody confrontation in the city of 200,000 to 300,000.
Not far from the checkpoint where Ibrahim was working yesterday, Captain Ed Sullivan, a Marine civil affairs officer, was reregistering police and ICDC members who were returning to work. About half of the original 1,000 officers have come back, he said.
Newly appointed commanders, he said, have pledged to investigate allegations that ICDC members helped lead four US contractors into an ambush in downtown Fallujah, where they were killed and mutilated in the attack that sparked the latest round of clashes.
Iraqi forces suffered from the quick training regimen designed to get many of them on the job quickly and the US failure to properly equip them, Sullivan said.
''They'd been promised a lot of stuff. They had no heavy weapons, no body armor. Their families were living in a war zone," he said.
Down the road, Ibrahim, 36, and two fellow corps members who were 17 and 21, pointed to their chests, saying they needed flak vests.
They insisted that they and other police and ICDC members fled Fallujah not out of fear or disloyalty, but because they wanted to take their families to a safer place.
Now that tens of thousands of civilians have fled the city, Ibrahim said, ICDC members could more easily root out ''strangers and bad people. We know how to deal with Iraqis."
Lieutenant Matt Peterson, commander of the platoon that lost a corporal in a suspected police ambush, expressed skepticism. He said testing joint patrols in Fallujah would only delay the job of defeating insurgents that would eventually fall to Marines.
US policy makers, he said, ''can waste as much time as they want trying to create a facade that this is a joint effort. But it's not." "
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