His lance corporal roused him after a long night of gunfire to tell him that an Iraqi was walking down the street in no man’s land, known to Alpha Company as “Bulls*** Boulevard”, his hands suspiciously in his pockets.

“I got one of my juniors to fire a warning shot, but the guy kept on walking, so I said, ‘Let me do it,’ ” Corporal Ryan, a likeable 26-year-old from Oklahoma, said. His best friend, Lance Corporal Blake Wofford, was killed in the frontline fighting in Fallujah this week.

“Now one of my best friends is dead, I’m thinking maybe this is the guy who got him. Last year I’d have never shot a guy without a weapon. But I’m a demolition expert; you can hide a lot under your clothes.”

Death can come from any direction here. A hundred yards from where the body still lies, a burgundy Mercedes-Benz stands half out of a driveway. It was shot trying to pull out into the dangerous territory where only Iraqis carrying white flags are allowed to roam.

This is what US Marines — the first coalition forces to enter Iraq last year — are trained to do, and they do not give it a lot of thought. “It feels numb now,” said Lance Cor- poral Ryan Deady, a fresh-faced 20-year-old wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the regimental logo “Make Peace or Die”. Corporal Long said: “I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

The sooner we get one of these bad guys, the sooner we can go home.”

The rules of war here are as nebulous as the front line snaking between the ramshackle industrial zone and the residential area across the Boulevard, where Iraqi snipers and mortar men lurk.

Just days ago, Corporal Long saw an Iraqi ambulance screech up to a wounded man, accompanied by members of the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps (ICDC), a US-trained paramilitary force. Instead of retrieving the injured man, the three men in the Red Crescent ambulance fired rocket-propelled grenades at the Marines, then sped off as the ICDC men gave them covering fire.

“We walked into this thinking there’d be good guys and bad guys. Then you get here and have men in ambulances firing RPGs at you,” he said.

In some forward posts, the snipers are so persistent that the Marines have given them names: “Bob the Sniper” regularly fires high-velocity, armour-piercing rounds at the troops. “The intelligence guys told us there are Syrian snipers out there and they know what they’re doing. They have a will to fight us, they want to fight us,” Corporal David Silvers, from Louisiana, said. The fighters in Fallujah are determined and tough, many of them fierce tribesmen who are enraged at the idea of a foreign occupation of their land.

Major-General James Mattis, the Marines’ commander, wants to allow Iraqi leaders to negotiate a way out of the fighting with Fallujah community elders. “Either the enemy commander is not in control of his men, and he’s not the right person to talk to, or he’s not respecting the ceasefire,” he said on a tour of forward command bases yesterday.

“A lot of senior enemy fighters may have left, leaving behind their dumb footsoldiers all jazzed up on jihad. There’s clearly a lack of good faith by the fighters in town.”

The Marines have little regard for their foes’ mettle or fighting ability. “When we capture them, they cry like babies. Then they p*** themselves,” Lieutenant Michael Liguorni said. “We find these little drug bottles around; we think half of these guys are drugged up,” he said, as the eerie hiss and bang of rocket-propelled grenades broke the silence, followed by the rattle of rifle fire and the zing of ricochets.

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