Holding Ramadi.

The Government Centre in the middle of the devastated Anbar capital of Ramadi resembles a fortress on the wild edge of some frontier: It is sandbagged, barricaded, full of men ready to shoot, surrounded by rubble and enemies eager to get inside. The American Marines there live eight to a room, rarely shower for lack of running water and defecate in bags that are taken outside and burned. The threat of snipers is ever-present; the Marines start running the moment they step outside.

Daytime temperatures hover around 49 degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit); most foot patrols have been cancelled because of the probability of heat stroke. The food is tasteless; the windows boarded up. The place reeks of urine and too many bodies pressed too close together for too long. So it goes in Ramadi, the epicientre of Iraq's Sunni insurgency and the focus of a grinding struggle between American forces and the guerrillas. In three years there, the Marines and the army have tried nearly everything to bring this provincial capital of 400,000 under control. Nothing has worked.

Now, American commanders are trying something totally new. According to the New York Times last week, instead of continuing to fight for the city centre, or to rebuild it, they will get rid of a very large part of it. They are planning to bulldoze about three city blocks in the centre including some of its largest buildings and convert them into a "Green Zone", a version of the fortified and largely stable area which houses Iraqi and US leaders in Baghdad. The idea is to break the stalemate in the city by ending the struggle over the provincial headquarters which the insurgents assault nearly every day.

The Government Centre will remain; empty space around it will deny the guerrillas cover to attack. The NYT quoted Col. Sean MacFarland as saying: "We'll turn [it] into a park".

Ramadi is regarded by US commanders as the key to securing the rest of Anbar Province, now the deadliest place for American soldiers in Iraq. Many neighbourhoods are up for grabs, nominally controlled by the US but offering sanctuaries for guerrillas. While the focus in Baghdad and other large Iraqi cities may be reconciliation or the political process, in Ramadi it is still war. Sometimes the Government Centre is assaulted by as many as 100 insurgents at a time. The casualties are heavy. Recently a midnight gun battle between a group of insurgents and Marines lasted two hours, and ended only when the Americans dropped a laser-guided bomb on a half-destroyed building in the city centre. Six Marines were wounded; it was unclear what happened to the insurgents.

The Iraqi government exists in Ramadi in little more than name. Recently about $7m disappeared from the Rafidain Bank - most of the bank's deposits - right under the nose of a US observation post next door. An Iraqi police officer was shot in the face and dumped in the road, his American ID card stuck between his fingers. The governor of Anbar, Ma'moon Sami Rashid al-Alwani, still comes to work in Ramadi under an US military escort. But many of the province's senior officials deserted him after the kidnapping and beheading of his secretary in May. The previous governor was assassinated, as was the chairman of the provincial council in April. At a recent meeting of the Anbar provincial cabinet, only 6 of 36 senior officials showed up. The Iraqi police patrol the streets in only a handful of neighbourhoods, the ones closest to the US base.

In the slow-motion offensive which has been unfolding in Ramadi, in which the Americans have been gradually clearing individual neighbourhoods, nearly all of the fighting has been done by US Marines and soldiers, not by the Iraqi Army. The 800 Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 8th Regiment, who until recently were responsible for holding most of the city on their own, have lost 11 since arriving in March. One of the "Habits of Mind" drilled into the Marines from posters hung up inside: "Be polite, be professional and have a plan to kill everyone you meet".

The Marines at the Government Centre have held, but the fighting has transformed the area into an ocean of ruin. The sentries who man the roofs have blasted the larger buildings nearby so many times that they have given them nicknames: Battleship Gray, Swiss Cheese, the Gay Palace. The buildings are among those to be bulldozed under the "Green Zone" plan.

Holding the place has cost blood. A roadside bomb killed three Marines and a sailor on patrol in Ramadi in March. Another Marine was shot by a sniper - through the forehead. The number of Iraqi casualties, insurgents or civilians, is unknown and impossible to determine in the chaotic conditions. In the end, whether the Americans can succeed in bringing security to Ramadi will depend on how much support they can draw from Iraqis.

Many Iraqi civilians have spent the last three years caught between the two warring camps, too afraid to throw their lot with one group or the other. It is, by nearly all accounts, a miserable situation, with individual Iraqis often simultaneously under threat by insurgents and under suspicion by the Americans. Many complain of bad treatment and unjustified killings, by both Americans and insurgents.

But the Marines say their highest priority is winning over the people, even at the cost of letting insurgents escape. Indeed, the Marines seem far less aggressive than they did during their earlier tours in Ramadi, when their priority was killing insurgents. Now, they seem much more interested in capturing the loyalty of the locals. Iraqi civilians, by and large, did not seem to fear the Marines as they passed on patrol. When the Americans rumbled past, the Iraqis often continued whatever it was they were doing: talking, sitting, standing, eating. The children held up their hands for soccer balls, and occasionally a Marine would toss one to a child.