The U.S. military in Iraq is abandoning - deliberately and with little public notice - a centerpiece of the widely acclaimed strategy it adopted nearly two years ago to turn the tide against the insurgency. It is moving American troops farther from the people they are trying to protect.

Starting in early 2007, with Iraq on the brink of all-out civil war, the troops were pushed into the cities and villages as part of a change in strategy that included President Bush's decision to send more combat forces.

The bigger U.S. presence on the streets was credited by many with allowing the Americans and their Iraqi security partners to build trust among the populace, thus undermining the extremists' tactics of intimidation, reducing levels of violence and giving new hope to resolving the country's underlying political conflicts.

Now the Americans are reversing direction, consolidating in larger bases outside the cities and leaving security in the hands of the Iraqis while remaining within reach to respond as the Iraqi forces require.

The U.S. is on track to complete its shift out of all Iraqi cities by June 2009. That is one of the milestones in a political-military campaign plan devised in 2007 by Gen. David Petraeus, when he was the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and his political partner in Baghdad, Ambassador Ryan Crocker. The goal also is in a preliminary security pact with the Iraqi government on the future U.S. military presence.

The shift is not explicitly linked to U.S. plans for increasing its military presence in Afghanistan, but there is an important connection: The logistical resources needed to house and supply a larger and more distributed U.S. force in Afghanistan have been tied up in Iraq. To some extent that will be relieved with the consolidation of U.S. forces in Iraq onto larger, outlying bases that are easier to maintain.

These moves coincide with priorities expressed by President-elect Obama during his campaign: reducing the U.S. military commitment in Iraq and putting more resources into Afghanistan. It also fits with Petraeus' view that a more robust counterinsurgency approach is needed in Afghanistan, meaning not only a larger number of troops but also getting them spread out into more villages.

But it also points up a major gamble in Iraq - namely, that the Iraqis are ready to handle the insurgency themselves.

Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and an occasional adviser to Petraeus, is among those who worry about the consequences of excluding U.S. forces from the cities.

"It gets us out of the way" should Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki decide to use Iraqi security forces to crush the U.S.-allied Sunni neighborhood militia groups who have been instrumental in attacking extremist elements of the insurgency, Biddle said in an e-mail exchange. Al-Maliki sees those militiamen, whom the U.S. has dubbed "Sons of Iraq," as an internal threat to Shiite political predominance.

Biddle said that on balance he believes the risks are more likely to outweigh the benefits of sticking to the June goal.

Retired Army Col. Peter Mansoor, who served as Petraeus' right-hand man in Baghdad during the U.S. troop buildup and has written a book, "Baghdad at Sunrise," about the counterinsurgency effort, also has misgivings. He said in an e-mail exchange Tuesday that his main concern is sectarian violence.

"Without U.S. forces in the cities, the Shiite and Sunni militias could once again take to fighting each other without an honest broker to keep the peace," he said. "The Iraqi army is not ready to play this role, in my view - not yet, anyway."

Ready or not, U.S. commanders are marching steadily in that direction - and not just in Baghdad.

Brig. Gen. Martin Post, deputy commander of U.S. forces in western Iraq, where the Sunni insurgency has sharply abated - if not almost disappeared - since 2007, said Monday his outfit is shutting down the U.S. base at Fallujah. The U.S. headquarters elements there are moving to al-Asad air base, a large but remote facility in the vast desert halfway between Fallujah and the Syrian border.

"There's been a big effort to move all the Marine forces out of the cities," Post said in a videoconference with reporters at the Pentagon. "And so as you go throughout, from Fallujah all the way up the Euphrates River Valley, up to al-Qaim - where we used to have Marines actually living in the cities - we've pulled them all out."

It was one of the world's first, greatest cities - a place where astronomers mapped the stars millennia ago and kings created an early code of law and planted what became known as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Yet little remains of the ancient capital, as seen by The Associated Press during a trip to Babylon last month on one of the few permits issued by Iraq's government since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. The site has the aura of a theme park touched by the ambition of dictator Saddam Hussein and the opportunism of looters: Modern walkways run beside crumbling old walls, a reconstructed Greek theater and a palace built for Saddam atop an artificial hill.

Now, for the first time, global institutions led by the U.N. are thoroughly documenting the damage and how to fix it. A UNESCO report due out early next year will cite Saddam's construction but focus, at the Iraqi government's request, on damage done by U.S. forces from April to September 2003, and the Polish troops deployed there for more than a year afterward.

The U.S., which turned Babylon into a military base, says the looting would have been worse but for the troops' presence. The U.S. also says it will help rehabilitate Babylon, funding an effort by the World Monuments Fund and Iraq's State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, but has yet to release precise funding figures.

Archaeologists hope the effort will lead someday to new digging to follow up on the excavations done by a German team in the early 1900s.

"The site is tremendously important," said Gaetano Palumbo of the New York City-based World Monuments Fund. Yet in its present state, Babylon is "hardly understandable, as a place where so much happened in history."

Past excavations focused on the monuments such as temples. But domestic quarters remain largely unexplored, Palumbo said, and new methods could reveal new facts or reinterpret findings from excavations done 100 years ago.

For decades, Babylon has been virtually off-limits to the world whose culture it helped create.

First came Saddam's attempt to create a major tourist attraction aimed at glorifying his own image, which led to shoddy reconstruction of ancient sites and construction of restaurants and other facilities in the 1980s. Most international experts stayed away because of the regime's reputation, the eight-year war with Iran and U.N. sanctions.

Next, Babylon suffered in the chaotic days after Saddam's downfall in 2003, at roughly the same time that Baghdad's national museum was looted. Archaeologists say looters took museum items at Babylon, mostly plaster replicas, and burned excavation reports and other studies.

Then came the occupation by U.S. and Polish troops in 2003 and 2004. Heavy vehicles and machinery pounded on ancient brick and on sand rich with pottery and other fragments. Military forces built a helipad, carved out parking areas and trenches, destroyed part of an ancient brick road called the Processional Way and filled bags with sand containing bones and pottery pieces, according to Iraqi officials and a British Museum report done several years ago.

Even as Babylon was damaged, there has been no extensive, large-scale archaeological work here in nearly a century.

There is no trace of the Hanging Gardens, said to have been built for the homesick wife of King Nebuchadnezzar II, or the tower believed to have inspired the Bible's tale of Babel. King Hammurabi's code of law, inscribed on a giant stone slab almost 4,000 years ago, has long sat in Paris' Louvre. The city's symbol - the original Gate of Ishtar named for a Babylonian goddess and built by Nebuchadnezzar - is Berlin's Pergamon museum.

At the site, near the Euphrates River about 60 miles south of Baghdad, the AP journalists saw a gaudy reconstruction of the Ishtar gate built during Saddam's time, plus part of the original gate's foundations. The foundations hold unglazed depictions of a dragon, some appearing damaged.

A spell of relative peace in Iraq is giving Babylon a second chance. However, tremendous challenges remain.

There is still little security or infrastructure at Babylon or at most of Iraq's 12,000 other archaeological sites. Looting across Iraq appears to have eased, at least temporarily, because of stricter international controls and reports of a saturation in the illegal market in Iraqi artifacts, according to archaeologists.

But the country has only 1,500 police who guard the sites to prevent looting. Many areas remain too dangerous for visitors or scholars to travel, and some fear heavier violence could resume, making any work a target.

Although Iraq's government is involved in the project, a top aide to Iraq's prime minister told the AP that the government has more pressing priorities. And it could take years for Babylon to get on UNESCO's list of World Heritage sites, a prestigious designation Iraq can only seek after implementing conservation codes.

John Curtis, keeper of the Middle East collections at the British Museum and a contributor to the upcoming UNESCO report, was one of the first to discover and document the post-invasion damage to Babylon in December 2004. Four years later, he says it's a great step that UNESCO is ready to sign off on a document, but that infrastructure and stability will be key to any new exploration.

"You need to have a large team," Curtis said. "It would be a great mistake to rush into excavations without appropriate resources at hand."

Other ancient sites and museums in Iraq and their status, when known:

---

- The Sumerian city of Ur, near Nasiriyah in the south and, according to the Bible, the home of Abraham, the biblical patriarch. The ruins contain a largely intact ziggurat, or temple structure. A team led by the British Museum concluded some damage may have been done by coalition troops from nearby Tallil air base. Access is now restricted.

- Uruk, a Sumerian city southeast of Baghdad. Gilgamesh, a legendary king of the city, became the subject of an epic tale. The British Museum says the earliest evidence of writing was found in Eanna, an original settlement of Uruk. The writing appears on clay tablets later used as building foundations.

- Ctesiphon, capital of the Persian empire, on the Tigris river southeast of Baghdad. The Roman emperor Julian II was so entranced by Ctesiphon's architecture that he ordered his legions to leave it alone. During the 1991 Gulf War, shock waves from bombing triggered cracks at the ruins, which contain the world's widest single-span arch of unreinforced brickwork.

- Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire, in northern Iraq. The Bible's Book of Jonah mentions the city, said to have had magnificent gates and canals. Nineveh lies across the Tigris from Mosul, where insurgents are active today.

- Nimrud, another ancient Assyrian city near Mosul. The Bible refers to it as Kalakh. Excavations in the 19th century uncovered huge sculptures of winged lions. Iraqi experts uncovered hundreds of pieces of gold jewelry and ornaments there in the late 1980s.

- The National Museum in Baghdad remains closed after severe 2003 looting and is expected to remain closed to the public for up to two more years until security in Baghdad is better, according to director Amira Eidan. The U.S. and Iraq recently said they will open a conservation and historic preservation institute in Irbil in Iraq's north. That $14 million plan will also refurbish the National Museum.