The 10 humvees speed by a burnt-out tanker hit a week ago, and the charred chassis of a car bomb exploded one day before.

In the past, teenagers have zealously ripped apart the frames of burnt out sports utility vehicles and cursed US troops.

The narrow roadway, lined with farms and densely packed communities that count about 450,000 people, has been the stage for numerous drive-by shootings.

Seven Spanish intelligence agents were gunned down here in November. Two CNN employees were killed in January and a Polish journalist shot dead in May.

Just east of the insurgency hotbed of Al-Anbar province, the Mahmudiyah region functions as a crossroads for resistance heading down into the Shiite Muslim hearltand or traveling up north to Baghdad.

"Mahmudiyah is one of those in between places. It's one of the stops where you can blend in," said Major Brian Neil, of the Second-Battalion, Second Marines.

The town itself, lined with loitering unemployed, military- aged men is a snapshot of the insurgency's different strains.

"Many different groups ... choose to fight us," says Neil.

"I think you have the former regime elements who want to go back to the time of Saddam. You have religious extremists who can't be comfortable with the fact we're here ... (and) disenfranchised youth who need to latch on to something."

The hatred against the US-led forces can spread like wildfire as it did in April when the US military assaulted the insurgency hotbed of Fallujah and faced down Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr's revolt across central and southern Iraq.

"It's culturally hip to fight the coalition," Neil said.

"We feel or came here believing we are here to do the right thing.... (but) there are significant influences in their culture that feel otherwise."

Marines have to combat clerics that label them untrustworthy in their weekly sermons, as well as some tribal leaders, deadset against them, and perhaps fanning the insurgency, said Lieutenant Colonel Giles Kyser.

The troops try to win by treading softly, planning reconstruction projects and step-by-step building up an Iraqi security force -- no easy task in an area where the police and national guard are regularly attacked.

In their minds, they can see a slow measure of progress.

The marines take heart in the fact that the Mahmudiyah police and the Iraqi national guard beat back an attack on the local police station last week.

Recruiting the unemployed military-aged males on the street to join the Iraqi security forces is one method to drain the pool of potential anti-US fighters, Kyser said.

"If we can provide for them a positive ... something that reinforces their honor and desire to contribute to the country, have them involved in the police and national guard, we should do that," Kyser said.

The tactic has brought the marines together with a man, named General Mudir, a former officer in Saddam's Republican Guard, who is serving as the advisor to the area's new national guard battalion.

But for every success, there is a step back. The police station in Yusifiyah was looted and burnt to the ground in mid-June.

Six national guard were killed in an ambush last week. In April, a female translator who marines had nicknamed the "Dragon Lady" because of a tattoo on her arm, was shot dead by unknown assailants. They suspect the insurgents listen in on Iraqi security force radio lines and some police are probably double agents.

Guarding a rotting Iraqi tank, abandoned in the spring 2003, Lieutenant Karl Noradeen drips sweat and speaks enthusiastically about how one defeats an insurgency.

"It's caring for people," he says.

If a bomb goes off, "We ask people if they're OK," he says, explaining the minutiae of winning a psychological war.

The marines hold their fire if shooting at the enemy means there might be civilian casualties, he says.

It's proving the insurgency's rhetoric is hollow and false, he says.

Asked how long it might take, he grinned and says half-joking: "A place like this, maybe a decade."

WAR.WIRE