Baghdad, Iraq ? The U.S. military is avoiding once-common arrest techniques like bagging suspects’ heads, the U.S. commander in charge of the Iraqi capital said, because such actions are considered humiliating by Iraqis and are pushing new recruits into the insurgency.

“You’ve got to see it from a force protection standpoint: You’re making more enemies,” U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli told The Associated Press. “When we mistreat one person, I’ve got a net increase of nine enemies.”

A U.S. soldier puts his foot on a suspected Iraqi thief in Tikrit, Iraq, in this May 10, 2003, file photo. The U.S. military is avoiding arrest techniques like bagging suspects' heads and stepping on detainees, a U.S. official said, because such actions may be pushing new recruits into the insurgency.

Soldiers are told to avoid handcuffing or blindfolding suspects — often done by placing a cloth sack over a suspect’s head — in front of their families, said Chiarelli, who commands the Texas-based 1st Cavalry Division, which controls security in Baghdad.

The Army’s 1st Infantry Division, which guards a swath of the Sunni Arab homeland north of Baghdad, started a similar “dignity and respect” initiative in April. Its commander, Maj. Gen. John Batiste, asked soldiers to be more courteous at traffic checkpoints and to stop putting bags over detainees’ heads, division spokesman Maj. Neal O’Brien said.

Especially insulting is the practice of subduing Iraqi men by stepping on them.

“The worst thing in the world is to put him on the ground and put your boot on his head,” Chiarelli said in an interview Thursday at 1st Cavalry headquarters near Baghdad International Airport. “Honor is so critical in this society. You don’t take away a man’s honor.”

Baghdad residents, asked Friday about the changes, loosed a litany of complaints about the unpopular U.S. presence in Iraq, from the blocking of roads and bridges to aggressive driving and capricious detentions. Halting humiliating arrest techniques is a positive development, they said, but too little, too late.

“The detainee is not an animal to put a bag over his head,” said Qusai Talha, a 35-year-old laborer interviewed at Tahrir Square in central Baghdad. “Detention should be done politely, until the prisoner is proven guilty — or not. The Americans should have considered this from the start.”