HERE’S AN INTERESTING REPORT:

In the densely populated northeastern slum area of Saddam City, U.S. Marines pulled back to allow local people to hunt “mujahideen” volunteer fighters holed up in the area.

“The locals said they wanted to take charge of Saddam City and we said: ‘Roger that’,” Lieutenant-Colonel Lew Craparotta, commander of a Marine unit that moved back from the fringes of the suburb, told Reuters.

Local leaders told U.S. officers that non-Iraqi Arab fighters were still a threat in the mainly Shi’ite district.

“It’s much easier for them to identify the enemy than for us. We really can’t tell who is who,” Craparotta said.

The U.S. withdrawal will allow local men to carry weapons openly, set up checkpoints and cordon off areas where they suspect the Arab volunteer fighters are hiding.

Craparotta said it was not clear how many “third country nationals,” as the U.S. describes them, were in Saddam City.

Iraq has said thousands of volunteers from across the Arab world came to the country to help fight the U.S.-led invasion.

Local militia and the “mujahideen” fought fiercely through Friday night until after dawn, with the sound of sustained small arms and heavy machinegun fire suggesting substantial clashes between the two groups. U.S. forces were not involved.

I almost feel sorry for the guys who set off to “defend” the Iraqis, only to find themselves first scorned, and now hunted down and killed, by the very people they thought they were protecting. Kind of a post-Vietnam irony here, isn’t there? Not that I expect Robert Fisk to get it.

Sadly, the story doesn’t really shed much light on the how-armed-are-Iraqis question, though it seems as if these locals are arming themselves from looted Saddamite arsenals:

Baghdad is saturated with weapons, so both the militia and the Arab volunteer fighters have easy access to large arms and ammunition caches.

But that’s not the point of the story, so it’s hard to be sure.