A TELEVISED screening of photographs that show US troops humiliating and trying to “break” Iraqi prisoners has shocked America and prompted warnings that Iraqis will seek revenge.

The dozen pictures were among scores of shots taken by US soldiers depicting brutal and degrading scenes inside Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, formerly Saddam Hussein’s torture centre.

The Pentagon had urged CBS not to air the pictures for fear that they would inflame anti-American sentiment in Iraq. But the network’s 60 Minutes II showed them on Wednesday, saying that other media outlets were about to run them.

Bill Cowan, a former Marine lieutenant-colonel, said that the impact of the story would be serious. “We went into Iraq to stop things like this from happening and here they are happening under our tutelage. We will be paid back for this.”

The images show Iraqi prisoners stripped and forced to pose simulating sex, and piled into a heap of bare, protruding limbs.

Six soldiers face a court martial and eleven others have been suspended after one soldier came forward with evidence.

The coalition military spokesman, Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt, said: “We are appalled. If we can’t hold ourselves up as an example of how to teat people with dignity and respect, we can’t ask that other nations do that to our soldiers.”

The revelations came as four US Marine battalions were abruptly ordered yesterday to pull out of the besieged city of Fallujah after 25 days of fighting with insurgents.

Marines reacted with disbelief at the orders which came after repeated declarations of America’s determination to crush resistance. “It’s kinda bad when you’ve had friends who’ve sacrificed everything, then you’ve had to hand it over to someone else,” Corporal Travis Box, staring at the ground in his forward base, said. “We weren’t doing it for tangible things. We were doing it for intangible things like pride and honour.”

Under a remarkable deal struck late the previous night between coalition delegates, Iraqi Governing Council officials and local chiefs, the Marine battalions are to withdraw in a series of co- ordinated steps to points well beyond the city, and will be replaced by a scratch Iraqi force named the Fallujah Protective Army (FPA).

Worse, the FPA will be commanded by a Sunni general from Saddam Hussein’s era, and consist of up to 1,100 men largely recruited from the Fallujah area.

The Marines’ reaction was not hard to understand. They had suffered 10 dead and 72 wounded in the bloodiest battle since the war.

The coalition’s original goal — to root out those responsible for killing and mutilating four US contractors on March 31 — remained far from being achieved. And only on Wednesday President Bush had vowed once more to “secure” Fallujah.

It was a curious way to mark the first anniversary tomorrow of Mr Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech declaring combat operations over, but the coalition had little option. The battle of Fallujah, in which more than 600 Iraqis are thought to have been killed by American guns, mortars and helicopter gunships, had turned into a public relations disaster.

Lieutenant-Colonel Brennan Byrne, the Marine 1st Battalion’s commander, said: “Ultimately this represents an Iraqi solution for Iraqi security forces to take care of Fallujah.”

He said that the aim was for enough security to be established in the city to allow coalition troops and convoys to pass through the city unattacked, and that a total Marine withdrawal would be predicated only by the success of the FPA. The FPA exists as little more than a concept headed by a handful of Iraqi officers. Within days it may be taking over from some Marine cordon positions.

“We’ve been using artillery, mortars, airpower. What do they have? None of that. They are on foot and they don’t even have the numbers of one marine battalion,” Corporal Kenneth Thorpe said, Sheikh Ayad al-Izzi, a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party who helped to broker the deal, said that there was no chance of Fallujah ever surrendering the killers of the four American contractors. “Nobody specifically knows who did such a thing,” he insisted.

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