AMERICAN marines and military intelligence analysts are studying the tactics of insurgents in Iraq — staging mock hostage takings, roadside bombings and suicide missions, as well as studying the Koran, praying to Allah and learning to think like jihadists.

The Pentagon is struggling to adapt to an enemy that has just claimed the life of the 1,000th combat soldier in Iraq. “The department simply has to be more agile,” Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, admitted last week. “We have got to focus more on the post-conflict phase.”

Before the launch of the ground war Gary Anderson, a retired marine colonel, played the “red general” — Saddam Hussein — in Pentagon war games. He correctly predicted that the Iraqi leader would leave the open deserts to the American invaders and hunker down in urban strongholds.

The Americans’ high-speed high-tech “shock and awe” military campaign succeeded brilliantly. But Anderson’s predictions of a guerrilla war were not heeded. “The assumption was that the Iraqis would probably go quietly into the night. There was no back-up plan, so we’ve been forced to make it up as we go along,” he said.

The Pentagon is scrambling to make good its error and is putting troops through crash counter-terrorist courses. It wants combat-ready units to have more foreign language speakers and a greater understanding of local cultures.

Some courses are under way at military bases such as Fort Carson in Colorado, where the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment is practising convoy ambushes and mock negotiations with tribal leaders before heading to Iraq in the new year. Other courses have been contracted out to private suppliers.

On the outskirts of Moyock, a roadside strip of a town in North Carolina, business is booming at the highly discreet, heavily guarded headquarters of Blackwater USA. The company supplied Paul Bremer, the former American envoy, with bodyguards in Iraq, and it was Blackwater former special forces employees who were hanged from a bridge in Falluja last spring, an incident that prompted an inconclusive American onslaught on the city’s insurgents.

Signs of construction are everywhere on the 6,000-acre site which conceals sizeable mock villages, tactical driving tracks and firing ranges.

In a prefabricated classroom former marine Walter Purdy of the Terrorism Research Center welcomes two dozen marines, military interrogators and a smattering of homeland security operatives to his intensive week-long “mirror-image” jihadist training course.

For a touch of realism, newcomers are supplied with traditional Arab garments and ordered to take off their shoes indoors. “You need to think of yourselves as mujaheddin, holy warriors,” the group is told, “and you aspire to be a shahid, a martyr killed in battle.”

In Ali G accents, the trainees learn to call out Allahu Akbar (God is most great) and Alhamdu Lillah (praise be to God). They are given a Penguin Classics translation of the Koran and an Islamic prayer mat and are shown how to pray.

“One reason you are strong is that the infidels go to church only on Sunday, but you kneel and reflect your submission to God five times a day,” Purdy told them in character.

“We don’t have nuclear weapons, but we have you and you are more powerful than the weapons of the Jewish dogs and infidel crusaders.”

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