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Guardian photographer Sean Smith, who has been embedded with US troops based near Baghdad, exposes the truth behind the ‘progress’: -

I realise that, by being embedded, I am seeing the country through the eyes of the occupiers. There is no way I can tell the whole story. But what I can do is show the gap between the rhetoric of the government in Baghdad and the reality on the ground. There is no effective administration here and the Iraqi army is a fiction. There are Iraqi soldiers alongside the Americans, but they owe their allegiance to a unit commander who is usually someone known to them previously. They are small bands or gangs of soldiers, not a national force.