As Lt. Col. Patrick Donahoe scans the horizon through the mud-splattered, inch-thick windows of his armored Humvee, he can almost see Bosnia through the palm trees.
It is not there yet, Colonel Donahoe said, but the communal hatred he has witnessed in this area of Iraq, the blindingly ignorant things people say, the pulling apart of Shiite and Sunni towns that were once tightly intertwined are all reminiscent of what he saw years ago as a young Army captain on a peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslavia.
"You talk to people here and it's literally the same conversations I heard in Bosnia," Colonel Donahoe said. "I had a police colonel tell me the other day that all the people in Jurf," a predominantly Sunni town, "are evil, including the children."
Jurf as-Sakhr, also known as Jurf, is 40 miles south of Baghdad. It is a community of crumbly dirt farms and dilapidated weapons factories and boys selling fluffy white chickens alongside the road. It sits right on a sectarian fault line that in the past few months has cracked wide open, and Colonel Donahoe is now back to playing peacekeeper.
The work is emblematic of a new role for the American soldier in Iraq, because as the threat has shifted, so has the mission. Sectarian violence is killing more people and destabilizing Iraq more than the antigovernment insurgency ever did. In response, American commanders, especially those in mixed Sunni-Shiite areas like Jurf, are throwing their armor, troops and money directly into the divide, trying to keep Iraq from violently partitioning the way Bosnia did.
What complicates their new mission is that the insurgency is far from over. It keeps mutating, finding new recruits and even new weapons; one soldier in Jurf was recently shot in the arm by an arrow.
Commanders have to simultaneously wage war and push peace, and Colonel Donahoe, along with other American officials, said the outcome of the entire American enterprise might hinge on how well they pulled off this balancing act.
"This is the critical year," Colonel Donahoe said. "If we don't turn things around, if we don't get the Shiites and Sunnis to stop killing each other, I'm not sure there's much else we can do."
Colonel Donahoe is experimenting with a number of tactics, like microloans to re-establish trade between Shiite and Sunni merchants; a political program to restore Sunni participation; and joint police patrols not joint American-Iraqi, but joint Shiite-Sunni.
He was trained to maneuver tanks, but he spends much of his time parked on carpets, chatting with sheiks, trying to ease suspicions one glass of tea at a time.
His soldiers have an even harder adjustment to make. Many are on their second tour in Iraq, and they have returned to a different war. When they were here before, in 2004, it was all about crushing the Sunni-led insurgency. Now, it is all about checking Shiite power.
Back then, if a lieutenant in his 20's went out to meet with a gray-bearded elder, it was to coax him to cooperate with the Americans, not with his neighbor.
The soldiers' quality of life, if it can be called that, may have improved. During the previous tour, the men cooked chicken in ammunition boxes and showered with hoses, if at all. Now they make Baskin-Robbins ice cream floats in the mess hall and sleep in air-conditioned bliss.
But this does not necessarily translate into higher morale. Peacekeeping, no matter what the stakes, is not war-fighting, many soldiers said. It does not deliver the same sense of adventure or the same sort of bonds.
"I'll never forget those guys I crossed the border with," said Command Sgt. Maj. Elijah King Jr., who is on his second tour. "It's not like that anymore."
The troops in Jurf are part of the First Battalion, 67th Armor, based at Fort Hood, Tex. The battalion, part of the Fourth Infantry Division, has about 1,000 soldiers and first came to Iraq in 2003 as part of the invasion force before rolling north of Baghdad for counterinsurgency patrols that continued through early 2004.
The battalion returned to Iraq in December 2005 and is now thinly spread over 2,700 square miles between Iskandariya to the north and Karbala to the south. Because of all the insurgent activity, the military includes this area in what it refers to as the Triangle of Death.
One of the hottest spots is Jurf, once home to lush date plantations, a Scud missile testing site and the Medina Division of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard. After the invasion, Jurf, with its concentration of former officers, Baathists, weapons experts and leaders of the powerful Janabi tribe, predictably festered, becoming a terrorist sanctuary.
Just south of Jurf is Hamiya, a mostly Shiite farming town that never enjoyed Jurf's whiff of privilege. While Jurf farmers drove tractors, Hamiya farmers swung hoes, and in an atmosphere of rising sectarian tensions, these deep-seated class rivalries eventually exploded. South of Hamiya are the almost purely Shiite towns of Musayyib and Sedda.
By the time the battalion arrived in December, insurgents had established an island hideaway near Jurf on a swampy spit of land between the Euphrates River and an irrigation canal. They stashed thousands of artillery shells there and ran a clandestine court, where insurgent judges would try, torture and execute collaborators, the Iraqi police said. Mutilated bodies were often found bobbing in the swamps.
Colonel Donahoe's soldiers soon discovered wires from roadside bombs snaking back to the island. On Jan. 10, they invaded, blowing up homes and unearthing an enormous weapons cache, though the insurgents apparently caught wind of the operation because by the time the tanks rumbled ashore, they had vanished. The bomb attacks continued, and in February, soldiers in a Bradley fighting vehicle fired on two suspects who they said tried to blow up a convoy and took off running, right past a house.
When the soldiers arrived at the house, the colonel said, a woman was screaming in the driveway, waving the severed leg of her daughter. The girl had been hit by an American shell and bled to death in front of the soldiers.
The troops have also been enmeshed in strange local dynamics. A few weeks ago, a schoolgirl came to them with an armload of books that included a chemical weapons training manual. She led the soldiers to her father, a former Iraqi Army colonel suspected of being an insurgent. After the soldiers detained him, they gave the girl a chocolate bar.
They have also gone on raids with local security forces. But this, too, has its risks.
One night last month, American troops helped police officers from Hamiya, the working-class Shiite town, aggressively round up 10 men, all Sunnis, from Jurf.
"I left thinking, wait a sec, were we just part of some sort of sectarian revenge?" the colonel said.
As things quieted down with the Sunnis, more problems emerged with the Shiites. Shiite-led police forces began detaining Sunnis and refusing to release them even after American commanders concluded they were innocent.
Yassir Naameh Naoufel, a Sunni elder in Jurf, said Sunnis could no longer visit Musayyib, a Shiite town. "If we do, we might disappear," he said.
Meanwhile, the Mahdi Army, a force of armed men loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, has been pushing into Musayyib, introducing a harsh brand of Islamic law.
According to Staff Sgt. Joseph Schicker, a psychological operations soldier, Mahdi militiamen recently threw battery acid on a woman whose ankles were showing and dragged a man accused of being gay through the streets.
Colonel Donahoe draws on the Balkans for an easy metaphor.
"Moktada is like Milosevic," he said, referring to the former Serbian leader. "He'll do anything to stay in power."
Colonel Donahoe, 38, calls Bosnia his "formative military experience," and it seems that the nine months he spent there in 1996 has been as valuable for him in Iraq as the 15 years he trained as a tank commander.
At a recent meeting he organized between Shiite and Sunni imams, the colonel shared one of his Bosnian lessons. "Those people were intermarried just like you," he said. "They lived together just like you. But certain leaders trying to grab power ripped that country apart." The imams nodded, the Shiites on one side of the room, the Sunnis on the other.
The colonel said he wanted to "reintegrate" local politics. The Musayyib district council, which oversees all the towns in an area with a total population of around 200,000, was a mix of Shiites and Sunnis before the war. Now it is run by 17 Shiites, the majority of whom support Mr. Sadr, with two nonvoting Sunni members.
To make matters worse, elders in Hamiya, which is technically part of the Jurf subdistrict but is mostly Shiite, now want to secede from Jurf, even though Hamiya has been part of Jurf for decades. The colonel said what he needed more than anything was a bona fide expert on governing.
"What do I know about running a district council?" he said.
He is also trying to revive trade links by using some of the battalion's $495,000 in reconstruction money to start a microloan program. The problem is, many merchants in Jurf and Musayyib are too frightened to travel from one area to the other to do the business they used to.
Tip-toeing through these issues is far more delicate than hunting insurgents, and the colonel seems to sense the difficulties of keeping his rank and file engaged. He tells all of his soldiers that they are now diplomats, and he uses them to interview merchants, for example, and protect the construction site of a new police station in Jurf. Insurgents blew up the last one, and the colonel is waiting to rebuild before taking on the delicate task of intermingling police forces.
"The only way this is going to work is if the patrols are 50-50, Shiite-Sunni," he said.
Shiite police officials have agreed, in theory, but have hired few Sunnis so far.
The colonel cited signs of progress. Bomb attacks are down. More shops are open. Fewer bodies are found bobbing in the swamp.
But it is not clear how receptive Shiites and Sunnis are to the reconciliation efforts. Often, the only common ground is anti-American anger, or at least disappointment.
Salah al-Shimeri, an Iraqi police official and a Shiite, told American soldiers during a recent meeting, "I just wish you could put this country back to the way you found it."
Sometimes, the colonel said, he is unsure whether that can be done. "How will it end?" he said one night. "I don't know."
"I think it will come down to an attrition of spirit. Either they'll get tired of fighting and quit. Or we will." 
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