Camp Ashraf, Iraq ? Surrounded by American tanks, an Iranian opposition group under orders to surrender agreed Saturday to turn over its weapons and submit to the demands of U.S. forces, Army officials said. The United States used the occasion to warn other forces not to assert power.

Representatives of the Mujahedeen Khalq operating near Baqubah, 45 miles northeast of the capital, struck the agreement after two days of negotiations with U.S. forces. Their capitulation was reported by the U.S. Army’s V Corps headquarters in Baghdad.

“V Corps has accepted the voluntary consolidation of the Mujahedeen Khalq forces and subsequent control over these forces,” V Corps said in a statement Saturday night. It said the process would take “several days” to complete.

It added: “When this process is completed, it will significantly contribute to the coalition’s mission to set the conditions that will establish a safe and secure environment for the people of Iraq.”

The Mujahedeen Khalq’s well-armed force, which for years fought Iran’s Islamic rulers from Iraq with the backing of Saddam Hussein’s regime, posed a potential challenge to the U.S.-led coalition’s authority as Iraq’s military occupier. American officials deemed it a terrorist organization in the 1990s.

Military officials at V Corps, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the group had agreed to “voluntarily hand over all their weapons” including sidearms. They will be permitted to retain their uniforms.

Calls to the group’s Paris headquarters Saturday were not answered.

The Mujahedeen Khalq’s weaponry will be consolidated into one area, its members in another. They will be “protected by American forces,” one military official said. A rival armed group backed by the Iranian regime is active in the area, and there have been fears the two would clash.

A crewmember of a U.S. Abrams tank directs the vehicle, en route to help surround the perimeter containing a camp for the armed Iranian resistance group in Iraq called the Mujahedeen Khalq, or MEK, near Baqubah, north central Iraq. The MEK, which has operated for years in Saddam Hussein's Iraq in its efforts to to undermine Iran's religious regime, has agreed to surrender its weapons to the United States.

Any travel by members of the Mujahedeen Khalq, including into Baqubah to purchase food, will be “under escort,” the United States said.

The V Corps statement did not use the word surrender, and the military officials said they would not describe the capitulation in those terms. The officials said members of the organization would not be classified as prisoners of war but under a status “yet to be determined.”

“Surrender implies there was a fight,” said Lt. Col. Bill MacDonald, a military spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division.

Saturday’s capitulation, which appeared nonetheless to be a surrender in everything but terminology, underscores the U.S. desire to be the unquestioned and unchallenged armed force in Iraq a month after the fall of Saddam’s regime.

Its announcement of the Mujahedeen Khalq developments was accompanied by a warning to any groups that might assert authority in postwar Iraq.