On April 5, U.S. Marines surrounded Fallujah, a city in southern Iraq, in preparation for insurgence fighting; three weeks later, the combatants are still exchanging increasingly deadly fire and the deadline for transferring governmental power to the Iraqis looms in a state of limbo.

The first Sunday in April provided the public with the gruesome discovery of four dead Americans in Fallujah. Their bodies had been mutilated and were shown being dragged through the streets in an incident that was eerily reminiscent of events in Somalia in 1994. U.S. troops surrounded the city the next day and what has followed is a three-week long firefight between the Iraqi opposition and the occupying U.S. forces and the deadliest fighting in over a year.

Moktada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric with a devout following in southern Iraq, is said to be the mastermind behind this recent deadly insurgence movement. As late as Saturday, April 24, Sadr was continuing to rally his followers with messages of destroying U.S. forces, despite a cease-fire agreement imposed for the weekend.

"Stand together to regain our rights and to ensure the return of our normal way of life," al-Sadr urged all Iraqis.

For a few months al-Sadr has been encouraging and threatening a widespread insurgence movement against the U.S. occupying forces. The militia he formed was built by the support of tens of thousands of his devout followers and is said to contain its own religious courts and prisons.

Al-Sadr's father, a powerful Shiite cleric was assassinated in 1999 by Saddam Hussein's regime, as were his two brothers and an uncle in the years that followed. Since the overthrow of that regime, Al-Sadr has come to power as the voice of radical Iraqi opposition.

Before the most recent fighting, U.S. officials had tried to silence that voice. On March 28, U.S. forces closed al-Sadr's newspaper, Al-Hawza. The paper had been printing articles highly critical of American occupation and U.S. leaders saw the articles as inflammatory. In shutting down the paper, which had a circulation of more than 10,000, tension between the Al-Sadr and his followers grew against U.S. troops and could have acted as a catalyst for the recent fighting.

In addition to the attacks on April 4, the past week has seen the most serious fighting since U.S. troops toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad last March.

On April 20 insurgent forces fired on a holding area for 7,600 Iraqi political detainees, Abu Gharib prison, killing 22 prisoners and wounding 92. Officials speculate that the insurgents might have been trying to create a diversion that would make it possible for some of the prisoners to escape. A day later, three car bombs exploded in the center of Basra, killing 20 and wounding more than 60. A majority of the dead were Iraqi schoolgirls killed when one of the blasts hit their school bus.

This past weekend, April 23-26, saw the greatest casualties of the recent insurgence, despite the implementation of the cease-fire agreement. On Sunday April 25, mortar bombs and rockets were fired into a crowded chicken market in Sadr City, one of al-Sadr's strongholds, killing 14 Iraqis and wounding 36 others. On that same day, 30 miles south of Baghdad, a roadside bomb killed 14 Iraqis traveling to the city. Seven U.S. soldiers were killed by firefights.

By the end of the weekend, the total number of American soldiers who had died in April was brought to 109, the highest death toll since the war began. The previous high was seen in November when 82 soldiers were killed.

There is no official number of Iraqis dead, although Fallujah, where most of the fighting is centered is thought to have lost 271 people.

The major insurgence movement, based in Fallujah, has spread to at least five other cities in Iraq, most of which are in the country's southern region.

In Najaf, Ramadi, Kufa, Nasiriya, Basra and Baghdad al-Sadr and his militiamen have taken over government offices and overthrown the Iraqi security forces that had been based in the cities. In Ramadi, 12 Marines were killed in a raid on their air force base. The insurgence movement responsible for all of this destruction, although mainly Shiite, is not exclusive to any religious or cultural movement.

What the U.S. occupation has created in Iraq is a unique environment unlike anything ever seen before. Sunni and Shiite Muslims, as well as foreign terrorists and opposition supporters from surrounding Arab countries are all joining to fight their one common enemy: Americans and U.S. occupation of Iraq.

In addition to the unique mixture of people joining the resistance movement, the insurgents are beginning to employ dangerous new ways of gaining attention. They are known to be stockpiling weapons, such as surface-to-air missiles, and in the past month have begun kidnapping foreign members in the alliance. Already three Japanese and seven Chinese have been kidnapped, as well as several American soldiers.

As a result, April has seen three members of the alliance announce their withdrawal from Iraq. Spain, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic have all promised that they will be pulling troops out on, if not before, the June 30 deadline.

President Bush, in an attempt to stem the foreign and domestic fear caused by this most recent rebellion, addressed the nation on April 14. In his address he promised that the date of political turnover was fixed at June 30 and stated his intentions that the United States would continue fighting and rebuilding until the job in Iraq was completed.

Even before the United States went into Iraq, one of the major questions was if, or when, the United States was successful in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, were the plans for the post-war period stable enough to provide security and a return to a suitable, democratic way of life for the Iraqi people. As the months of post-war rebuilding have continued, the criticism of the Bush Administration and their insufficient post-war plans has grown and many officials feel that the Iraqi insurgence is a result of the lack of planning.

For Dr. Shawn Shieh, a professor of Political Science at Marist College agrees that the post war condition of Iraq should have yielded more consideration.

"I understand the desire to have a complete upheaval of the Iraqi system because you don't want to leave members of Hussein's party in power, you want it to be a new start," he continued, " but at the same time, by completely eliminating the Ba'ath party members from their positions, it has taken much more time and money than anticipated to train new people; it's only logical to say that we could have spent more time on the post war process."

In response to some of that criticism, the Bush Administration has enlisted the aid of the United Nations. In addition to the more than one billion dollars of humanitarian aid that they have supplied to the Iraqi people, the UN, in April, sent an envoy to Baghdad to help formulate a plan for the governing council so that Iraq will be capable of taking over sovereignty of its government on June 30.

Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister is the UN's special envoy to Iraq and has the difficult task of creating a blueprint for the political transition of the Iraqi government. His current plan involves the appointment of a prime minister, a president and two vice presidents, which would ensure an ethnic balance in the volatile culture of current Iraq. An added caveat in Brahimi's plan would ensure that the members of the transfer government could not run for office until January of 2005 and that members would be unable to make laws or oil contracts until elected.

Although this plan has not yet been implemented, Brahimi has promised that there would be a caretaker government available, most likely established towards the end of May, for the transition at the end of June.

Although the U.S. has asked for the aid of the U.N. envoy and is relying on Brahimi to create a viable exit plan, many people doubt that the transition that takes place on June 30 will be a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops or even U.S. occupying forces. Professor Shieh has doubts about the handover.

"It was always going to be more of a partial hand-over, giving the Iraqis more ownership of their government, but still the U.S. is going to have to be there to monitor the situation. The fighting only makes it more complicated. We want to hand over their government to them, but how do we make them believe that we won't control it, it's a tough situation," he said.

Others disagree about the amount of input the United States should have in the new Iraqi government, citing the insurgence fighting as merely a result of the growing tension and distrust between the U.S. and the Iraqis, many who feel that the United States is beginning to overstep its military boundaries.

According to Yahya Mahmoussoni, the Arab League Ambassador to the UN, Americans should be prepared to leave Iraq or face more deadly insurgence fighting.

"Sovereignty is sovereignty…you can't divide it. If you want the violence to end, there must be full sovereignty," Mahmoussoni said, as reported in the Los Angeles Times on April 27.

U.S. forces are still fighting the insurgent forces and radical Iraqi opposition forces, and as the deadline approaches, with Iraqi society in such limbo, it is not a question of when the government will be turned over, but what kind of society will the governing council face on June 30.