A senior American official in charge of running Baghdad has left her post and is returning home as part of a major shake-up by Washington of the post-war administration in the city, according to US officials.
The Washington Post also reported yesterday that the American military unit directing the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down its operations, frustrated that it cannot find any proof that Iraq had stockpiles of banned weapons.
Ms Barbara Bodine, a former US ambassador to Yemen and the US co-ordinator for central Iraq, will leave the country "in the next couple of days".
She is due to move to a senior post at the State Department, Maj John Cornelio, of the US Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, told Reuters in Baghdad.
Retired US army general, Jay Garner, appointed by the Pentagon to oversee reconstruction work in Iraq, will also be departing soon with some of his senior officials, the Post reported.
Last week US President George Bush named career diplomat and former counter terrorism chief Mr Paul Bremer as the top civil administrator in Iraq after the failure of the Pentagon team to adequately tackle the huge post-war problems in Iraq.
Mr Bremer (61), an assistant to Secretaries of State William Rogers and Henry Kissinger in previous administrations, is already in Qatar where the US has a major military base, and is expected to arrive in Iraq later this week.
One of Ms Bodine's tasks as effective mayor of Baghdad had been the restoration of public services, but electricity has yet to be fully restored, rubbish remains uncollected and looting continues almost a month after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Her reassignment to Washington after just three weeks came in a late night call on a telephone that had been installed only hours earlier, the Post reported.
The departure of Ms Bodine, one of the few members of the US team in Baghdad to speak fluent Arabic, may be connected to internal Washington politics. She reportedly antagonised the US anti-terrorism community, of which Mr Bremer is a prominent member, by accusing the FBI of damaging US-Yemeni relations in the way it conducted its investigation into the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen.
Gen Garner had promised to restore Baghdad's infrastructure by June 15th and had held meetings with Iraqi political leaders to form a transitional authority by the end of the month.
He said before the war he expected to remain in Iraq for three months and recently startled reporters who questioned the slowness in restoring civilian order and services by saying: "We ought to look in a mirror and get proud, and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say, 'Damn, we're Americans'!"
Criticism has mounted in recent weeks that Gen Garner and his superiors at the Pentagon did not plan adequately for the task of running Baghdad in the wake of a war that destroyed vital infrastructure, and that they isolated themselves from the city's problems in a marble-floored Republican Palace on the Tigris River.
The appointment of Mr Bremer is a setback for the Pentagon which had insisted that the reconstruction effort remain under military control.
The State Department argued before the war that a civilian with diplomatic experience should co-ordinate reconstruction activities to avoid the perception that any interim Iraq administration is a puppet of the US military.
The Washington Post reported yesterday that the military experts and scientists searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad are leaving after scores of fruitless missions to find suspected weapons sites.
The task force members consistently found targets identified by Washington intelligence to be inaccurate, looted or burned.
US Central Command began the war with a list of 19 sites to be inspected and all but two have been cleared.
The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as it is called, will likely leave Iraq next month the Post said, quoting senior US officials. Top Pentagon officials recently claimed that the search for weapons of mass destruction had only begun.
The US has barred the re-entry of UN weapons inspectors, insisting that it will find the banned weapons through its own efforts and interrogation of Iraqi officials.
Iraqi officials have all along insisted that the regime of Saddam Hussein had destroyed or discontinued its unconventional weapons programme.
Air Force Gen Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned yesterday that weapons of mass destruction might still be in the hands of Iraqi special units and could be used against US and British forces.