There are few American patrols on the streets of Baghdad and soon there will be none. In just over two weeks, on June 30, US military forces will withdraw from Iraqi cities. The occupation which began six years ago is ending. On every side there are signs of the decline of US influence.

When Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki held a meeting with 300 top military commanders last week a US general who tried to attend was asked to leave. “We apologize to you, but this is an Iraqi meeting and you’re not invited,” he was told.

US commanders and diplomats comfort themselves by reflecting that Al-Maliki is burnishing his Iraqi nationalist credentials in the months before the crucial parliamentary elections at the end of next January. But his public distancing himself from the US shows that he believes that anti-Americanism has a strong appeal to the majority of Iraqis.

There are other more covert signs of receding American influence. In the years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi National Intelligence force was controlled and paid for by the CIA. Iraqi politicians say that Iraqi Intelligence is now reverting to the control of its own government.

Iraqis are only slowly taking on board that the US is really pulling out. Some 133,000 US troops remain in the country; the last combat troops will depart in August 2010 and the remaining US forces at the end of 2011. The 16,000 Marines who have been in Anbar province west of Baghdad since 2003 will leave Iraq by next spring.

The knowledge that the US forces are to go is already transforming the political landscape. It is no longer politic for any Iraqi leader to be identified with the American occupation.

The US forces are leaving behind a country in which security is much better than during the bloodbath of 2006-07, but it is still probably the most dangerous country in the world. Many Iraqis ask if there will be an upsurge of fighting as the US troops go, although violence is already high.

Last week saw serious incidents in Baghdad, as well as northern and southern Iraq, that underscore the fragility of the improved security. The most dramatic attack was the assassination of Harith Al-Obaidi, the leader of the main Sunni bloc in Parliament, as he was leaving the Al-Shawaf Mosque in the Yarmouk district of west Baghdad on Friday.

Al-Qaeda had demonstrated its long reach against a Shiite target earlier in the week, when a car bomb blew up in the town of Batha, 225 miles southeast of Baghdad, killing at least 30 people and wounding 65.

In northern Iraq, Kurds and Arabs are engaged in a war of words that has a potential for violence that could surpass anything that Al-Qaeda could launch. At stake is control, along a 300-mile-long unofficial frontier, of areas that are outside the highly autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government but have Kurdish majorities.

The Kurds have shown over half a century that they can destabilize Iraq and even Saddam was unable to crush them. Al-Maliki may be tempted to take advantage of the current strong anti-Kurdish feeling among Arabs, both Shiite and Sunni, to gain popularity before the elections, but it would be a short-sighted and dangerous move.

But the Kurds can feel the balance of power swinging against them as the US departs, the Baghdad government grows in political and military strength, and the Arabs in Nineveh and Kirkuk become more assertive.

Although Iraq remains very violent and its government corrupt and dysfunctional, the prospects for the country may not be so bleak as they at first appear. Two wars were fought in Iraq after the fall of Saddam in 2003. One was the insurgency based in the Sunni community against the US occupation. The other was a bloody civil war between Sunni and Shiite, at its height in 2006-07.

Both these are ending. The US forces are going. The Shiites largely won the civil war. Baghdad is now three-quarters Shiite and they control the 600,000-strong security forces.

It would be difficult, and probably suicidal, for the Sunni community to go back to war. Al-Qaeda would like to provoke Shiite retaliation by repeated atrocities but so far this has not happened.

Iraqi society and the economy remain shattered by 30 years of war and sanctions. But one of the main destabilizing factors in Iraq for the last six years has been the presence of a large US Army, and with its departure Iraq’s many simmering conflicts might just be kept under control.