BAGHDAD: The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost.

Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years. But the Iraqi government and the US now are able to shift focus from mainly combat to mainly building the fragile beginnings of peace a transition that many found almost unthinkable as recently as one year ago.

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point where the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government.

That does not mean the war has ended or that US troops have no role in Iraq. It means the combat phase finally is ending, years past the time when President Bush optimistically declared it had. The new phase focuses on training the Iraqi army and police, restraining the flow of illicit weaponry from Iran, supporting closer links between Baghdad and local governments, pushing the integration of former insurgents into legitimate government jobs and assisting in rebuilding the economy.Scattered battles go on, especially against Al Qaeda holdouts north of Baghdad. But organised resistance, with the steady drumbeat of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and ambushes that once rocked the capital daily, has all but ceased.

This amounts to more than a lull in the violence. It reflects a fundamental shift in the outlook for the Sunni minority, which held power under Saddam Hussein. They launched the insurgency five years ago. They now are either sidelined or have switched sides to cooperate with the Americans in return for money and political support.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, said this past week there are early indications that senior leaders of Al Qaeda may be considering shifting their main focus from Iraq to the war in Afghanistan.

Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Iraq, said on Thursday that the insurgency as a whole has withered to the point where it is no longer a threat to Iraq’s future.

“Very clearly, the insurgency is in no position to overthrow the government or, really, even to challenge it,” Crocker said. “It’s actually almost in no position to try to confront it. By and large, what’s left of the insurgency is just trying to hang on.”

Shia militias, notably the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, have lost their power bases in Baghdad, Basra and other major cities. An important step was the routing of Shia extremists in the Sadr City slums of eastern Baghdad this spring now a quiet though not fully secure district.

Al-Sadr and top lieutenants are now in Iran. Still talking of a comeback, they are facing major obstacles, including a loss of support among a Shia population weary of war and no longer as terrified of Sunni extremists as they were two years ago.

Despite the favourable signs, US commanders are leery of proclaiming victory or promising that the calm will last.

The premature declaration by the Bush administration of “Mission Accomplished” in May 2003 convinced commanders that the best public relations strategy is to promise little, and couple all good news with the warning that “security is fragile” and that the improvements, while encouraging, are “not irreversible”.

Iraq still faces a mountain of problems: sectarian rivalries, power struggles within the Sunni and Shia communities, Kurdish-Arab tensions, corruption. Anyone could rekindle widespread fighting.

But the underlying dynamics in Iraqi society that blew up the US military’s hopes for an early exit, shortly after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, have changed in important ways in recent months.

Systematic sectarian killings have all but ended in the capital, in large part because of tight security and a strategy of walling off neighbourhoods purged of minorities in 2006.

That has helped establish a sense of normalcy in the streets of the capital. People are expressing a new confidence in their own security forces, which in turn are exhibiting a newfound assertiveness with the insurgency largely in retreat.

Statistics show violence at a four-year low. The monthly American death toll appears to be at its lowest of the war four killed in action so far this month as of Friday, compared with 66 in July a year ago. From a daily average of 160 insurgent attacks in July 2007, the average has plummeted to about two dozen a day this month. On Wednesday the nationwide total was 13.

Beyond that, there is something in the air in Iraq this summer.

In Baghdad, parks are filled every weekend with families playing and picnicking with their children. That was unthinkable only a year ago, when the first, barely visible signs of a turnaround emerged.

Now a moment has arrived for the Iraqis to try to take those positive threads and weave them into a lasting stability.

The questions facing both Americans and Iraqis are: What kinds of help will the country need from the US military, and for how long? The questions will take on greater importance as the US presidential election nears, with one candidate pledging a troop withdrawal and the other insisting on staying.

Iraqi authorities have grown dependent on the US military after more than five years of war. While they are aiming for full sovereignty with no foreign troops on their soil, they do not want to rush. In a similar sense, the Americans fear that after losing more than 4,100 troops, the sacrifice could be squandered.

US commanders say a substantial American military presence will be needed beyond 2009. But judging from the security gains that have been sustained over the first half of this year as the Pentagon withdrew five Army brigades sent as reinforcements in 2007 the remaining troops could be used as peacekeepers more than combatants.

As a measure of the transitioning US role, Maj-Gen Jeffery Hammond says that when he took command of American forces in the Baghdad area about seven months ago he was spending 80 per cent of his time working on combat-related matters and about 20 per cent on what the military calls “nonkinetic” issues, such as supporting the development of Iraqi government institutions and humanitarian aid. Now Hammond estimates those percentage have been almost reversed. For several hours one recent day, for example, Hammond consulted on water projects with a Sunni sheik in the Radwaniyah area of southwest Baghdad, then spent time with an Iraqi physician/entrepreneur in the Dora district of southern Baghdad an area, now calm, that in early 2007 was one of the capital’s most violent zones.

“We’re getting close to something that looks like an end to mass violence in Iraq,” says Stephen Biddle, an analyst at the Council of Foreign Relations who has advised Petraeus on war strategy. Biddle is not ready to say it’s over, but he sees the US mission shifting from fighting the insurgents to keeping the peace.

Although Sunni and Shia extremists are still around, they have surrendered the initiative and have lost the support of many ordinary Iraqis. That can be traced to an altered US approach to countering the insurgency a Petraeus-driven move to take more US troops off their big bases and put them in Baghdad neighbourhoods where they mixed with ordinary Iraqis and built a new level of trust.

Army Col Tom James, a brigade commander who is on his third combat tour in Iraq, explains the new calm this way: “We’ve put out the forest fire. Now we’re dealing with pop-up fires.”

It’s not the end of fighting. It looks like the beginning of a perilous peace.

Maj-Gen Ali Hadi Hussein al-Yaseri, the chief of patrol police in the capital, sees the changes.

“Even eight months ago, Baghdad was not today’s Baghdad,” he says.

—AP