Most U.S. Army officers interviewed this week said patrols in and around the province's capital, Ramadi - home to many who were military or intelligence officers under Saddam Hussein - had stopped largely because soldiers and commanders were tired of being shot at by insurgents who have refused to back down under heavy American military pressure.

Asked for comment, officials from the Marine battalion in Ramadi - about one-fifth of the forces in the city - provided a 21-year-old corporal who confirmed that Marines had discontinued patrols but said it was because of the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis.

While U.S. officials here would not provide exact numbers, there clearly has been a significant drop in patrols.

After losing dozens of men to a "voiceless, faceless mass of people" with no clear leadership or political aim other than killing Americans, the military has had to reevaluate the situation, said Maj. Thomas Neemeyer, head intelligence officer for the First Brigade of the First Infantry Division, the main military force in the Ramadi area and eastward to Fallujah.

"They cannot militarily overwhelm us, but we cannot deliver a knockout blow, either," he said. "It creates a form of stalemate."

Given the security situation, U.S. officials have all but abandoned plans to install a democratic government in the city and are hoping instead that Islamic extremists and other insurgents do not overrun the vast province in the same way they seized Fallujah, the region's most infamous city.

"Since Ramadi is the seat of the governate, we worry that if they could unsettle the government center here, they could destabilize the al-Anbar province," said Capt. Joe Jasper, a First Brigade spokesman.

The apparent failure of a long line of Army and Marine units to pacify Anbar - which stretches from Baghdad to the Syrian border - will be a major challenge for the new government and could be a tipping point for the nation as a whole. Increasingly, Iraq is a place in which cities or parts of cities have been taken over by insurgents and radicals.

U.S. officers in Ramadi, a city of 400,000, openly acknowledge that Iraq's national guard - the security force trained to take over the hunt for insurgents - has become a site-protection service so far unable and unwilling to conduct offensive operations.

When Anbar's governor left the city last month, the head of the national guard, since replaced, took part in an attempt to overthrow him. National guardsmen in Ramadi have refused to go on patrols either alone or with the Americans. The 2,886 national guardsmen in Ramadi so far have detained just one person.

To show how operations in Anbar have changed, Jasper sketched a map. Pointing to a neighborhood outside the town of Habbaniyah, between Fallujah and Ramadi, he said: "We've lost a lot of Marines there and we don't ever go in anymore. If they want it that bad, they can have it."

He pointed to another spot on the western edge of Fallujah: "We find that if we don't go there, they won't shoot us."

Marine Cpl. Charles Laversdorf, who works in his battalion's intelligence unit, said the Marines averaged just five raids a month and no longer were running any patrols other than those to observation posts.

The sharp reduction in patrols flies in the face of recent comments by a top military official in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"Any insurgent that... somehow thinks that after June 28 we'll be pulling back into base camps will be disappointed," he said. "This is a long-term program of handing over responsibility... . It's not going to take days nor weeks; it's going to be months and years."

More than 124 U.S. troops have died in Anbar since President Bush declared major combat operations over May 1, 2003.

Between the First Brigade's 4,000 soldiers, in Ramadi since September, and a battalion of 1,000 Marines that came in February, more than 80 have been killed and 450 injured.

Since the June 28 handover of sovereignty, 25 U.S. troops have been killed, 15 in Anbar.

The numbers grow more striking at smaller unit levels.

Capt. Mike Taylor, for example, commands a 76-man company in nearby Khaldiya. Eighteen now have Purple Hearts, awarded for combat wounds.

The Marines' Echo Company, with 185 troops, has lost 22.

"There's a possibility that we'll say we'll protect the government and keep travel routes open, and for the rest of them, to hell with them," said Neemeyer, the intelligence officer. "To a certain degree we've already done it; we've reduced our presence."

He continued: "I'm sure they are beating their chests and saying they drove us out, but what have they driven us out of? Rural farmland that's not tactically important... . If they want to call that victory, that's fine."

Looking up at a wall map, he flicked his laser pointer across the space between Ramadi and Fallujah. "We don't go into that area anymore," he said. "Why go there when all that happens is we get hit?"

The U.S. military has poured $18 million into reconstruction projects in Ramadi, but Neemeyer said the projects had not won over the people. "The only way to stomp out the insurgency of the mind," he said, "would be to kill the entire population."

The commander of a local national guard battalion, Col. Adnan Allawi, said he thought the situation would only get worse.

"If the Americans stay here, the same thing that happened in Fallujah will happen in Ramadi," he said. "If the situation stays the way it is now, the Americans will begin losing one city after the next."

Residents in Ramadi had long said the U.S. military underestimated the resolve of fighters in the area. Also, they said, U.S. forces made community support for the resistance stronger with each cultural misstep, from brusque house raids to cultural slights of tribal sheikhs.

Many interviewed in Ramadi recently said they would welcome a Fallujahlike insurgent rule.

Muhanad Muhammed, a pharmacist, said: "The Americans misbehave... . That's why I do not blame the mujaheddin when they attack them."

Capt. John Mountford, who oversees a central command office in Ramadi for local police, national guard, and U.S. officials, said that in retrospect the military should have paid more attention to what Iraqis were saying.

"We should have worked with the tribal leaders earlier," he said. "I just wonder what would have happened if we had worked a little more with the locals."

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