‘It’s All Over’--GIs Due to Leave South Iraq Today : Pullout: Last of 8,000 refugees are airlifted to Saudi Arabia. Free water, food and medicine come to an end.

The last of more than 8,000 Iraqi refugees under U.S. care in southern Iraq were airlifted to Saudi Arabia on Monday while this tiny, wrecked town braced for the final departure of American troops.

The crowded camp that once gave shelter to Iraqis fleeing civil warfare in southern Iraq was empty Monday, except for a handful of U.S. soldiers, tanks and armored vehicles. The endless rows of tents lined up behind concertina barbed wire had been dismantled, piles of trash buried, and the sand was being bulldozed.

Monday was also the last day for free water, food and medical care offered to the Iraqi townspeople by American forces.

“This is it; it’s all over,” said Col. John Kalb, a battalion commander from the 3rd Armored Division, the last American troops in southern Iraq.

The Americans, all 2,400 of them, are expected to withdraw southward into Kuwait today, when a small, lightly armed U.N. peacekeeping force is fully deployed.

The transfer marks the end of the U.S. occupation of southern Iraq.

American soldiers were ordered to remain when, in an embarrassment to the Bush Administration, it appeared that refugees, some of whom rose against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, would be abandoned as the Persian Gulf War came to an end. In the last several weeks, the Americans have provided food, water and protection to thousands of Iraqis who feared reprisals from their government’s agents.

A breakthrough came when Saudi Arabia agreed to take the Iraqis into a refugee camp as a temporary measure. Others have been accepted in Iran.

Nevertheless, concern remains for those left behind in Safwan, where the tension between anti-Hussein factions and government loyalists spills over into graffiti and drive-by shootings.

In this impoverished, ramshackle town, slogans painted onto a bombed customs house say, “Down, Down Saddam Hussein” and “Iraqi People in Danger. Please Help Us. . . . “

But some of the graffiti have been painted out, and newer signs praise the Iraqi strongman as “Commander of the Arabs,” adding, “We Love Brave Saddam.”

Over the weekend, American military officials report, three gunmen armed with AK-47 assault rifles attacked a Safwan resident as he read a newspaper in his car. When U.S. military police arrived, the gunmen fired on them too, damaging their truck.

On Monday, military commanders were called in to remove a grenade left in an elementary schoolhouse, along with a scribbled warning not to begin classes.

Both incidents illustrate what U.S. authorities said is an increasing conflict between pro- and anti-Hussein forces. The Americans warn against the menace of Iraqi secret agents or police who intimidate Safwan residents and who cannot be stopped because U.S. forces are pulling out.

The final withdrawal of American troops seems to dismay Safwan townspeople, who have relied on the Americans for food and water.

“They keep asking us, ‘Bukra? Bukra? (Tomorrow? Tomorrow?),’ ” said Sgt. Dennis De Masters, who runs the water-distribution system. “We say we don’t know.”

De Masters is one of about 20 soldiers who dispense water from a 75,000-gallon tanker into the waiting pails and plastic buckets of hundreds of Iraqi women. On Monday, they lined up around a dusty, barren field for the last time.

One woman cloaked in traditional black, who said she has 12 children and one more on the way, said she will be able to get “bad water” from a well but that she and others fear death from Hussein’s agents because they had accepted help from the Americans.

“What will I do?” she asked. “God knows.”

While many of the Safwan townspeople have indoor plumbing, the water lines that run from Basra, another Iraqi city devastated by the war, remain cut.

Meanwhile, the future of the refugees who have been taken to Saudi Arabia is also unclear.

About 600 were airlifted Monday to a Saudi camp near the town of Rafha. A total of 8,211 have made the trip since the rescue mission began April 28, Col. Kalb said.

The last American C-130 cargo carrier, flight Alfa-528, had only 36 passengers, although at its height the airlift was taking 1,700 to 1,800 people a day, according to U.S. Air Force Capt. Winston Churchill, a reservist from Tacoma, Wash., who runs the airlift from an Iraqi airstrip that escaped bomb damage during the war.

Another C-130, its huge interior space empty, sat on the paved strip awaiting any refugee stragglers who might come along Monday night or early today.

The refugees have filed onto the aircraft, adults and children, carrying only the most meager belongings and unsure of what awaits them.

“They ask what it will be like, will it be another camp or will there be buildings,” Specialist Rhonda Mefferd, an Arabic-language translator, said of the refugees.

“They’re just looking for a better life. I tell them I haven’t seen the new camp. I don’t want to give them a false impression.”