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FARIS, Iraq - The American military recently moved into this small town 10 miles south of Falluja, one of the most violent locales in Iraq, to secure it for the coming elections, and the insurgents took all of a day to respond. They fired a rocket that missed the Americans and landed instead in a nearby playground, killing a 12-year-old boy and wounding eight other children.

"We were playing football," Ahmed Hamad Ali, also 12, said from his hospital bed the next day. "They made a big bombing."

Some residents are directing their anger not at the insurgents but at the marines, whose arrival, they say, drew the attack.

"They are like two people chasing each other," Baha Abbod, 28, a teacher.

It is hardly an unknown reaction in Iraq, where many civilians have been killed and wounded in cross-fire. But the military is bracing for a surge of situations like this one as American and Iraqi forces race to establish security for the referendum on the new Iraqi constitution to be held on Oct. 15.

"Security preparations in support of the referendum are under way throughout Iraq," said Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, a military spokesman in Baghdad.

The Marine operation was created to re-establish the presence of the Iraqi police in this town and a nearby village, Ameriya, which sits on the Euphrates River south of Falluja. The area is dominated by Sunni Arabs, who have balked at joining the Kurds and