BAGHDAD - A U.S. Marine commander in Anbar province predicted that al-Qaida fighters will be expelled from Fallujah by August as the military moves to cut insurgent supply and reinforcement lines into Baghdad and surrounding areas.

Brig. Gen. John Allen, the deputy commander for American forces west of Baghdad, said al-Qaida in Iraq has largely been pushed out of population centers in much of the Anbar province.

He cited the success in turning Sunni tribes against the organization and an influx of American troops to chase al-Qaida out of Iraqi and regions around the capital.

“The vast majority of them have been pushed out of the population centers,” Allen said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press. “The surge has given us the troops we needed to really clear those areas, so we cleared them and we stayed.”

He said U.S. and Iraqi troops were trying to repeat recent success in calming Ramadi, the provincial capital, using the same neighborhood-by-neighborhood tactics in Fallujah - a Sunni insurgent bastion that was first cleared by a massive American assault in 2004.

“We're going to finish off those neighborhoods by August,” he told AP. “The people are really responding well, establishing very quickly neighborhood watch organizations and a police precinct headquarters now in every neighborhood,” he said.

Allen said the military planned to oust al-Qaida fighters from Karmah, 30 miles south of Baghdad, by the end of July, and tackle them in the area around Tharthar Lake to the north.

“We're going to clear Karmah here very shortly,” he said, describing the town as a “way station” to and from the capital, “and we're going to go up around Lake Tharthar and we're going to go after them there.”

A new cooperation between U.S. forces and Sunni tribal leaders in recent months has allowed them to clear al-Qaida-led extremist elements from some of the most violent areas in the vast desert province that stretches west from Baghdad to the borders with Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

Allen said the arrival of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit in the area as part of a U.S. troop buildup ordered by President Bush has enabled the American forces to turn their attention to places previously considered no-go zones.

“We're going to start churning up the ground north on the grounds of Tharthar ... a spot where we haven't had forces before,” he said in an interview in a dining hall at the U.S. Embassy in the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad.

He said the aim was to keep the insurgents from using the area as a transit point amid concerns they have fled Anbar and Baghdad for safe havens in Diyala province, where another massive military operation is under way.

“What we don't want to do is chase them up there and make them a problem for those guys,” he said, adding they were planning combined operations with U.S. forces in northern Iraq.

Some Sunni tribes, which had fought with or offered sanctuary to al-Qaida in Anbar, have risen up against the group and are now receiving arms and training from U.S. forces. American military officials are trying to spread that success to al-Qaida areas now under attack.

But Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, said earlier this month that the United States should stop arming Sunnis who may have been part of the insurgency.

Allen said he understood that concern but stressed the Sunnis were being integrated into the Iraqi security forces and trained to avoid creating alternate militias.

“That's given them professionalization, it has tied them to the central government and coalition forces,” he said.

The commander said nationalist insurgents who oppose the U.S. presence in Iraq also have turned against al-Qaida's fundamentalist Islamic bent.

“The indigenous resistance is also fighting al-Qaida in their own way,” he said. “Some of these units are talking with us about what the future will look like and what role they will have.”