BAGHDAD — In the midnight darkness, U.S. soldiers show up unannounced at a house in the south of the capital to ask about some graffiti on a wall across the street praising Jaish al-Mahdi, a Shiite insurgent group.

As the soldiers checked the home, the elderly patriarch of the family living there says he knows nothing about the graffiti and that the family has no weapons. Two AK-47s, a stockpile of suspected explosive materials and a can of spray paint later, Sgt. John Hardin calls the Iraqi National Police to turn over three young men in the house as suspected insurgents.

The incident this week was a satisfying outcome for the soldiers. Like troops around the country, Hardin and his men are still working to ferret out insurgents while honing the skills of Iraqi security forces to do the same.

Will the Iraqis be able to carry out the same actions? Will they summon Americans for help?

Those questions are gaining urgency as Iraqi lawmakers debate the Status of Forces Agreement between the two countries. On Sunday, the Cabinet adopted the so-called security pact, which now awaits parliament’s approval.

The pact calls for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraqi cities and towns — effectively confining them to bases — by June 30 and from the entire country by Dec. 31, 2011. Experts say there is leeway for the Iraqis to ask troops to stay longer.

U.S. soldiers interviewed this week in Baghdad expressed various feelings about the withdrawal dates, including cautious optimism, skepticism the Iraqis are ready, wistfulness and a touch of fatalism. Iraqis seemed divided.

“I think it’s a sign of progress, it’s good,” Hardin, of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, said of the new agreement. “I don’t know if [Iraqis] will be [ready] or not, but I don’t think it will change anything if we stay.”

Capt. Garrett Cathcart, who is working with Iraqi National Police in Baghdad, has served two tours in Iraq and had friends killed in the war. There’s still work to do, but it’s time to start handing the country back to Iraqis, he said.

“At some point you’ve got to stand back and give it away, which is hard for us,” he said. “We’ve given so much blood and effort and time.”

Giving control back to the Iraqis is the right thing to do but the agreement should have more flexibility built in, said Capt. Nick Baranello, who is also serving in Baghdad.

“They should have dates, but they shouldn’t be set in stone,” he said.

Soldiers with the 4th Infantry Division’s 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment are conducting house-to-house searches in southeast Baghdad. They are divided on how well the Iraqis are doing.

“I think initially, it won’t be chaos, it’ll be smooth, but it’ll be a big change,” said 2nd Lt. Chris Denning, 24, of Lawrenceburg, Ind. “From working with the National Police, [I think] they have a long way to go before they can take over an area.”

Spc. Stephen Fischer, 35, of Oklahoma City, said he thought the transition would go well.

Now on his third tour, he sees the Iraqi army and police taking more pride in their jobs. “They’re getting a lot better at it; they’re getting more training,” he said.

“They should be able to take over. They’ll still have problems and issues, but nothing like they had.”

Sgt. Leonard Avalos, 23, of San Diego, said the Iraqi security forces are ready.

As for the “Sons of Iraq,” the armed civilian group praised for helping to calm down the country’s violence, “the leadership is there” but the lower-level leaders and entry-level members need some improvement, he said.

In Grafenwöhr, Germany, Spc. Michael Salinas, 23, of El Paso, Texas, who serves with the Iraq-bound 172nd Infantry Brigade, said he hadn’t heard about the plan for U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraqi cities.

He was unsure whether Iraqi forces were ready to take control of the cities. “We’ll have to see how it is when I get there,” said Salinas, who deployed to Iraq from 2005 to 2006. “If it is a lot more calm than last time, perhaps.”

Another 172nd soldier getting ready to go downrange, Sgt. Dana Springer, 43, of Malden, Mass., said the Iraqis need to be self-sufficient so Americans can take care of things in their own country.

“For us not to be taking the lead, that’s a big improvement,” he said.

Iraqis who were interviewed in Baghdad were fuzzy on the details of the agreement, but generally supportive of increasing Iraq’s sovereignty.

“It’s no problem if [U.S. forces] leave because the Iraqi army does a good job,” said Nasrat Sahan, a Shiite who fled with his family from his home in Baghdad’s Dora neighborhood during heavy sectarian fighting in 2006. Despite his confidence in Iraqi security forces, he said he is still scared to return to his old neighborhood.

Shaka Kiasm Muhammed, a retired engineer, said he’s glad to see the Iraqi government gaining increasing responsibility but hopes U.S. troops stay long enough to fend off nefarious influence from neighbors like Iran and Syria.

“If the Americans left (too early), my country would be destroyed,” he said, talking in the living room of his spacious south Baghdad home.

Stripes reporters Patrick Dickson and Seth Robson contributed to this report.

Now that virtually all “Sons of Iraq” groups in Baghdad have been shifted to Iraqi government control, such groups in the rest of the country will follow suit, officials say.

The transition, marked by a change in members’ pay from U.S. dollars to Iraqi dinars, is scheduled to be completed across the country by June, a critical time for the country.

Under a security pact being debated by Iraqi lawmakers, U.S. troops would withdraw from cities and towns by June 30 and work out of bases.

The armed civilian groups have been praised for helping calm down violence in the country, but some members have maintained Iraqi security forces have not accepted them.

As of last Wednesday, 24,810 of the 26,000 “Sons of Iraq” in Baghdad have been paid by the Iraq government. There were a few problems with pay, including the lack of extra pay for “Sons of Iraq” leaders, but those are being taken care of, according to a news release issued by Multi–National Division—Baghdad.

Diyala, Babil, Wasit and Qadisyah provinces are next, making the transfer in January, Col. Bill J. Buckner, a spokesman with Multi–National Corps—Iraq, said in an e-mail message.

Anbar province will do it in February, Ninevah and Kirkuk in March, and Salahaddin in April, he said.

Some “Sons of Iraq” members are being trained for jobs in the Iraqi security forces.

Heath Druzin / S&S A wanted poster is displayed at a market checkpoint in Baghdad’s Abu T’Shir neighborhood. Security officials credit the poster campaign with driving insurgents underground.

BAGHDAD — In a country that often feels like the Wild West, security forces are turning to a tactic straight out of the American West to isolate and arrest suspected insurgents: the wanted poster.

The posters are hung throughout Baghdad in bustling markets, at checkpoints, even on semi trucks. They include photos of the suspects, along with descriptions of their crimes and, maybe most importantly, offer a cash reward.

The newest low-tech approach — reminiscent of the deck of cards with pictures of key figures in the Saddam Hussein regime that the U.S. military produced at the beginning of the Iraq war — is paying dividends, Iraqi and U.S. officials said.

Tipsters looking for reward money have turned in a few suspected insurgents but, more than that, having their picture plastered across town has driven many of the wanted underground, officials said.

“Because they became famous, everybody knows them and they can’t work inside the city,” said Maj. Falah Mustafa, who works in Baghdad’s Saha neighborhood, one of many areas in the south of the city that has seen a steep drop in violence in recent months.

Military officials with Multi-National Division-Baghdad would not release how many suspected insurgents they are targeting with the campaign, but said that posters were also printed in miniature on millions of leaflets distributed across Baghdad.

The posters offer tipsters rewards of several thousand dollars for information leading to the capture of suspected insurgents. Tips are supposed to go to the Iraqi National Police.

Over the past year, attacks in Iraq have dropped sharply and bombs, rather than direct confrontation, have become the weapon of choice. The posters fit into a wider strategy that has included walling off neighborhoods and markets with concrete blast barriers and adding numerous checkpoints to filter traffic and more effectively search vehicles.

Capt. Garrett Cathcart helps train the national police and said the willingness of Iraqis to come forward with information about the suspects on the posters is directly related to improved security and more professionalism in the Iraqi security forces.

“Before, if you turned someone in you might have someone (insurgents) visit your house later that night,” said Cathcart, who is serving in Baghdad’s Rashid district with the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division.

Heath Druzin / S&S A woman takes a photo of a painting Wednesday at an art show in Baghdad’s Dora neighborhood. The art show opened Wednesday, and organizers hope the return of culture to the neighborhood, which had been torn apart by sectarian violence, will help cement security gains. Heath Druzin / S&S Farouk F. Rafeik speaks in front of one of his paintings at an art show he helped organize in Baghdad Dora neighborhood.

BAGHDAD — A bare foot, visible only to the ankle, ascends into a black abyss as a bright yellow comet passes overhead.

The darkness in the painting represents the life that Saddam Hussein stole from Iraq and the comet the hope of peace that U.S. forces brought, says artist Farouk F. Rafeik.

Rafeik’s work is part of something unthinkable one year ago: an art show in Baghdad’s Dora neighborhood, once one of the most violent enclaves in Iraq. In 2006 and 2007, the area was the scene of intense fighting, and many Iraqis were chased from their homes based on their religion.

The show opened Wednesday after months of planning by Rafeik and soldiers from the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, who also provided money for the event.

When they first approached artists about the event, the organizers were met with skepticism by people who still associated Dora with sectarian bloodshed, recalls Capt. Brett Walker, who helped coordinate the show. “It took some convincing,” he says.

Eventually, so many artists submitted work that organizers ran out of space in the modest room in the Dora Technical College that they used as a gallery. On opening day, a stack of paintings lay against the wall waiting to be rotated into the exhibit, which included paintings and sculptures in an array of mediums and styles.

Dozens of people streamed through the packed room during the first hours of the exhibit, and many more spilled into the hall outside. They looked intensely at the works, discussed them with friends. The only signs that this was no ordinary art show were the Iraqi National Police officers and U.S. soldiers mingling with the spectators.

It’s important to show the world that Iraqis appreciate culture, says Ahmed Hamid, an engineering student at Dora Technical College who was wandering the exhibit.

“American people still feel we ride the camels, still live in tents,” he says.

The art show also represented a step toward normalcy and civility for the area, says local neighborhood council member Yousef Ibrahim.

“It means goodbye to violence, goodbye to weapons, goodbye to killing,” he says.

Rafeik, who serves as an adviser to Iraq’s Ministry of Culture, is bespectacled with tousled gray hair and a professorial manner. At 60 years old, he says he remembers when Baghdad was a cosmopolitan city with a flourishing art scene. Saddam changed that by clamping down on artists and restricting what they could create.

“For a long time, I stopped painting,” Rafeik says.

Now, he says, Iraqis are beginning to reclaim an artistic heritage thousands of years old. He hopes to continue the slow process of rebuilding Baghdad’s art scene with another, bigger Dora show in February.

“We have to learn these lessons step by step,” he says.

In Rafeik’s painting of the foot, the comet representing American-secured peace has yet to land. The artist says there is still a long way to go for his city and his country.

“We are starting life now.”