With Lightning Speed, U.S. Leaves Occupied Iraq : Pullout: As Hussein’s forces re-establish control, fleeing refugees urge Americans to stay.

U.S. forces swept out of most of southern Iraq on Monday in a lightning withdrawal from occupied territory, leaving thousands of square miles of lonely desert and abandoned oil fields in their wake as their tanks rumbled back toward Kuwait.

A droning rush of military vehicles filed onto the main highway and south across the Iraqi desert shortly after dawn, and by late afternoon a majority of the estimated 40,000 troops remaining in Iraq had pulled back within a new nine-mile-deep buffer zone straddling the Kuwaiti border.

An eerie stillness prevailed over the vast countryside between the two major southern Iraqi cities of Basra and Nasiriyah, the normally busy highway traveled only by an occasional farm vehicle or refugee family making a last-minute dash for the border.

Within a matter of hours, U.S. soldiers had dismantled every American checkpoint along the 120-mile stretch formally under their control, sweeping away berms, pulling down flags, folding up tents, starting up the tank motors and driving off.

At the gateway to the ancient Sumerian city of Ur, 80 miles northwest of the Kuwaiti border and formerly just outside the fringes of the U.S.-controlled zone, an Iraqi military checkpoint established during the occupation barred visitors from the main residential area.

A Bedouin herdsman listlessly guided his sheep past the historic ziggurat monument nearby, seemingly oblivious to the changing of the guard that officially re-established Iraq’s control over the major part of its southern region.

In Safwan on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border, where tens of thousands have fled government reprisals directed at a short-lived rebellion against the regime of President Saddam Hussein, hundreds of refugees sat down in the street in the path of the withdrawing forces, urging U.S. troops to remain and protect them against what they fear will be the vengeance of the Iraqi army and secret police.

“If the American soldiers leave this place, what happens to the many people here?” asked Ali Abbas, who fled the violence in the Shiite Muslim holy city of Najaf for the new worries of the refugee camp. “I think when the American tanks leave here, I shall lie under the guns myself and die.

“We want to save ourselves,” he added. “There is much food and much water here, but we need freedom. Please, please help us save ourselves.”

U.S. military officials in the area said the last of the 3rd Armored Division, its 3rd Brigade, began pulling out toward an area just south of the buffer zone in Kuwait. The 1st Armored Division withdrew earlier in the week, and by Monday afternoon, the only apparent U.S. presence beyond the port-of-entry at Safwan was a line of six Bradley fighting vehicles parked in the sand several hundred feet off the highway.

Four soldiers lounged in the afternoon sun; one was half in and half out of the porthole of a Bradley, two more crouched on the deck, a fourth propped against the side in the shade, lazily passing Kool-Aid to half a dozen Iraqi children shouting and swarming around the vehicle.

Their job: to maintain a last screen of defense as the remainder of the division pulled out.

“We were the first ones into Kuwait, and we’ll be the last ones out of Iraq,” said Specialist Rob Pike of Morenci, Mich. “I just hope it’s soon. I got some big plans.” He grinned as a collective whoop arose from the Bradley. “I’m gettin’ married.”

As has happened every day since Thursday’s formal cease-fire, several Iraqi military deserters attempted to turn themselves in as prisoners and were refused. One, nearly hysterical, reported that large numbers of Iraqi soldiers were on foot just on the other side of the highway, perhaps conducting a reconnaissance mission to observe the American pullout.

“He says, ‘I want to come over here,’ just bawlin’ his head off,” said Pfc. Cody Waits. “He said there’s Iraqis all over the place out there. We been watchin’, but we ain’t seen any.”

It was not clear how quickly--if at all--Iraqi military authorities would seek to establish a presence in the area outside the United Nations-controlled buffer zone vacated by the American troops. Except for checkpoints already in place before the withdrawal and a lone truck that passed on the highway with a soldier sitting atop it wearing a Republican Guard uniform, there were no signs of the Iraqi military, or anyone else.

U.S. soldiers said that in the last few days they have detected a number of Iraqi soldiers who have attempted to come into the U.S.-controlled area and recover abandoned military vehicles. In each case, they said, the U.S. soldiers have fired warning shots, and the Iraqis have withdrawn.

U.S. forces are expected to remain in the demilitarized zone, stretching six miles into Iraq and three miles into Kuwait, until establishment of a 1,440-man U.N. observer force, scheduled to begin deployment in the next few days.

The Austrian chief of the force, Lt. Gen. Gunther Greindl, flew to Baghdad on Monday for two days of talks with Iraqi officials after meeting with Kuwait’s emir, Sheik Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah, and other Kuwaiti officials.

The U.N. force will include 300 observers, 680 infantrymen plus mine-clearing and air support units, but a number of refugees have expressed fears that the observers will be powerless to stop Iraqi secret police from finding and arresting refugees who supported the rebellion in southern Iraq.

Officials from the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees have arrived in Kuwait, but they refused to say when they will take over jurisdiction from the Kuwaitis and the Americans.

Hundreds of residents of the U.S.-controlled camp have moved in recent days to a second camp south of the Kuwaiti border in the hope that they will be safer there. U.S. officials say they are unsure what to advise the fearful refugees.

“Wouldn’t you be fearful?” asked Maj. Tom Grubbs, who heads the Army civil affairs unit overseeing the camp north of the border. “They’re heading to something they don’t know about, and I can’t do anything to reassure them because I don’t know what they’re heading to.”