Fallujah, Iraq ? Iraqi security forces fighting alongside Marines in Fallujah are angry, saying they’re outgunned by Sunni insurgents and resent being sent to fight fellow Iraqis.

“Eighty percent of us want to leave and go to Baghdad” because they don’t want to fight civilians in Fallujah, said Amar Hussein, a medic in the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.

The 36th ICDC Battalion was supposed to be the elite of the U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces, with members drawn from the militias run by various members of the Governing Council in order to fight insurgents who have been attacking U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies for months.

Now it finds itself involved in the bloody battle of Fallujah, where Marine forces have been fighting insurgents in the city, but where many civilians are also believed to have been killed. Mosques have been targeted by both sides, buildings in residential areas destroyed, soccer fields turned into makeshift graveyards.

The Fallujah siege has become a rallying point for anti-U.S. sentiment among Iraqis and their countrymen in the 36th Battalion are feeling conflicted.

“I feel there are very few terrorists in Fallujah, but because of the way the Americans are treating the civilians, we are creating more and more terrorists every day,” Firaz Munshed, a Shiite in the force, said Friday.

“If they did this in Sadr City, I would fight the Americans, too,” he said, referring to the mostly Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad where U.S. forces have been trying to put down the militia of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

The unprecedented fighting across Iraq this month has highlighted deep problems in the Iraqi forces that the Americans want eventually to take the front line against insurgents after the handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30.

In the south, police and some ICDC abandoned their stations when faced with attacks by Shiite militiamen, some out of fear, some out of mixed loyalties.

Iraqi Civil Defense Corps members and U.S. Army soldiers, background, guard the center of Baghdad, Iraq, after at least three mortars hit a busy commercial district, killing a Sudanese man. There was a series of explosions Saturday in the Iraqi capital, and smoke rose from the Karrada district after the mortars landed.

A battalion of the U.S.-trained Iraqi army refused outright to fight in Fallujah, west of Baghdad. The force came under fire as it left the capital and turned around, saying it did not sign up to fight fellow Iraqis.

The ICDC forces stationed in Fallujah before the fighting have abandoned their posts — and U.S. commanders acknowledged that some may be joining the insurgents.

“We have heard reports of that, but we certainly can’t confirm it. But we have heard reports as such,” said Maj. Gen. Joseph Weber.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Saturday that the 36th Battalion, made up of 240 members helping enforce the Marine cordon on the south side of the city, had been “acquitting themselves admirably.”