THEY are buried on the halfway line, lined up in neat rows gouged out of the football pitch by a giant mechanical claw.

Mounds of earth cover men and women, and there are smaller piles for babies and children who died during the month-long siege of Fallujah. On the pitch there are 32 graves, and 180 more on the practice park. Some contain more than one body. Who knows how many more lie in mosques and gardens.

“Martyr, unknown. Found in a white saloon car registration 31297 Iraq, Baghdad,” reads one headstone. The details are for relatives searching for bodies. On one there are no facts, just a boot and torn checked shirt.

This is the detritus of war at the football stadium in the centre of Fallujah, that was yesterday being draped with banners renaming it “Martyrs Cemetery”.

Like everywhere in the town, it is full of people dazed with shock and anger at the force of an American siege that has not stopped even yet, judging by the explosions in the distance and the frequent roar of F16s overhead. Although most of the streets are uneasily quiet, no one will escort journalists to the Golan area, still filled with snipers, the townsfolk say.

This was the scene yesterday in Fallujah, where thousands of families who fled during the siege streamed back to deserted streets after a tentative agreement which has seen US Marines pull back to the outskirts of town.

The deal involves a hasty marriage of convenience between the US-trained Iraqi Police and the nascent Fallujah Brigade — a unit of more than 600 former Iraqi soldiers sprung from the mind of a former Republican Guard officer, Major General Jassem Mohammed Saleh, whom no US Marine or Iraqi official appears yet to have vetted fully.

Last night there were further questions as General Richard Myers, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he did not believe General Saleh would be chosen to lead a peacekeeping operation in the volatile city.

“He (Saleh) has been one of them. They have to be vetted in Baghdad by the Coalition Provisional Authority and by the Iraqi minister of defence. That process is not complete. There’s another general they’re looking at. My guess is, it will not be General Saleh. It will not — he will not be their leader,” General Myers said.

But there are many tests ahead for these unlikely partners. The Marines insist they can return as quickly as they left. Even as horrified families arrived back yesterday to find houses bombed or shot to pieces, the insurgents were still out in force.

On several street corners The Times saw keffiyeh-masked youths with Kalashnikovs standing guard, and elsewhere “sentries” in breeezeblock bunkers. Within 100 metres of one Fallujah Brigade checkpoint, two men could clearly be seen rigging wires to a gas cylinder at the roadside.

US Marines believe some of the former Iraqi army troops replacing them in Fallujah have links to insurgents, and hope this will help them to end violence in the flashpoint city west of Baghdad.

The Americans hope the more moderate participants in the insurgency can be convinced to give up fighting and even join the Fallujah Brigade — which ultimately answers to General James Conway, who commands the marines in Fallujah. But they insist that the hardcore insurgents, including those they call “foreign fighters”, must be killed and captured.

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