A U.S. Army soldier from Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division tries to organize a group of Iraqi residents lined up for a medical clinic in the Amariyah neighborhood of west Baghdad.

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ERBIL, IRAQ

In the run-up to the mid-September progress report on Iraq, pundits, military commanders, presidential candidates, and seemingly every member of Congress who ever spent a few hours in the Green Zone, have weighed in on the efficacy, or not, of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

Missing from the debate, however, is one of the most crucial voices: the Iraqi people.

"If they leave, it will burn like hell," says Abdul Karim Khalil Malallah who once translated for the U.S. military police, but fled the violent chaos of Baghdad with his family last summer for the safer environs of Iraqi Kurdistan.

In dozens of interviews in several cities, Iraqi Muslims and Christians, Arabs, Kurds and Assyrians — people who would argue endlessly on other points of the U.S. occupation of Iraq — are in unanimous agreement on one point: U.S troops should not withdraw from their country.

"It will be a real civil war," says Asos Hardi, editor in chief of Awene (The Mirror), a leading independent Kurdish newspaper in Sulaimaniyah. "It will leave the country in chaos."

The governor of Erbil province, site of the Kurdish regional capital, agrees. "If the U.S. leaves, we must leave with them," says Nawzad Hadi Mawlood. "It will be a tragedy if they go."

Many fear that if the U.S .military leaves, the government in Baghdad would collapse — if it doesn't before that — and Shia militias, Sunni insurgency groups and foreign jihadis, each backed by neighboring countries, will scramble to divide Iraq into bloody cantons of control.

"The U.S. at least controls the situation now," says Imad Marbeen Yacoub,who fled Baghdad after paying jizyah, a "Christian tax," of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dinars demanded by men he assumed to be Shia militia members. If the U.S. pulls out, "the civil war will be more and more," he says.

While instability has marked the country since the U.S. invasion, the violence greatly increased after the February 2006 bombing of the Al-Askari Shia shrine in Samarra.

Shia militias, including those attached to political parties participating in the government and generally seen as backed by Iran, abandoned their prior restraint and unleashed a bloody spasm of sectarian violence on the streets of Iraqi cities.

In response, Sunni Arab Iraqi and foreign jihadi groups, generally seen as backed by Saudi Arabia and Syria, escalated the hostilities. The neighborhoods of urban centers in particular became battlegrounds of unbridled thuggery. Kidnapping, extortion, car bombings, mortar attacks, torture and murderous acts became the norm and left the civilian population huddled in their homes fearing for their lives.

Since the Samarra bombing more than 1 million Iraqis have felt compelled to lock their doors and steal away in the night, leaving behind their furnished homes, schooling, businesses and other property, and are living elsewhere in Iraq. Another 1.2 million were already displaced. And 2 million have abandoned the country altogether, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

"The government will withdraw with the Americans," says Farhad Daoud, who fled Baghdad and now lives in the Kurdish region.

Analysts fear that as well, and point immediately to the repercussions.

"It will be a disaster," says Muhammed Tofiq of Wusha, a Kurdish research organization. He points out that the Kurdistan Regional Government, for example, now depends on Baghdad for 96 percent of its annual budget.

While most Iraqis agree that the central government is barely functioning now, there is at least a structure in place that might allow for political reconciliation and a cessation of sectarian violence.

If that structure collapses, which people fear will happen without American support, there is no hope for a political solution. Various militias and armed groups and their supporters in neighboring countries will vie to divide the country into spheres of control and the ethnic cleansing terrorizing urban centers will expand to all of Iraq.

"It would be World War III, and divided by Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia … ," says Shmael Benjamin of the Assyrian Democratic Movement, which has one member in the Iraqi parliament.

Iraqis repeatedly point to Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia as "neighbors" who seek to destabilize Iraq. These Persians, Turks and Arabs view Iraq as a potentially powerful regional competitor spinning within the U.S. orbit and fueled by huge oil reserves.

Saudi Arabia fears another Shia Muslim-dominated country on its borders and supports Arab jihadis who fight to establish a Salifist Islamic state in Iraq from which they can base further expansion.

Iran supports Shia groups to further their reach in the country and solidify a larger Shia presence in the region. At the same time, it backs radical Sunni groups in northern Iraq to destabilize Kurdistan.

Turkey, with a Kurdish population of perhaps 15 million — 20 percent of its population — fears the successful "Iraqi model" of Kurds will embolden its own oppressed Kurds to seek an autonomous region. Should the central Iraqi government fail, Turkey already has some 140,000 troops poised to invade Iraqi Kurdistan.

Some Iraqis think that, aside from subversive neighboring interference, the current violence is the natural outgrowth of the historical processes that forced into one nation disparate ethnic and religious groups: Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians and Turkomen; Shia and Sunni Muslims, Christians and various smaller sects.

"Iraq became a state by force and when you release that force, this is what happens," says Hardi, the newspaper editor. "There is no Iraqi identity. Just slogans."

Lacking a sense of Iraqi identity, the country's various sectarian groups compete to grab the biggest piece of the pie for themselves and are vulnerable to the exploitation of neighboring countries that see a "divide and conquer" strategy in their best long-term interests.

Which is why Iraqis not involved in the sectarian violence feel the U.S. bears major responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen.

"America removed the statue (of Saddam Hussein) but they should stay until the end," says Paul Shamoun Ishaq of the Chaldean Cultural Center in Ankawa.

"America should finish what it started."