Cindy Sheehan, whose soldier son was killed in Iraq three years ago, said on Monday she was stepping down from her role as the figurehead of the US campaign against the war.

"This is my resignation letter as the 'face' of the American anti-war movement," she wrote in a sometimes bitter diary entry on the website Daily Kos. "I am going to take whatever I have left, and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children, and try to regain some of what I have lost."

Sheehan, 49, rose to prominence when she voiced her discontent with President George W. Bush's policies when he met her and other grieving members of military families.

Announcing her decision on Memorial Day, the anniversary on which the US remembers its war dead, she said that her announcement had been prompted by the recent hostility she had faced from Democrats.

"I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican party," she wrote. "However, when I started to hold the Democratic party to the same standards that I held the Republican party, support for my cause started to erode, and the 'left' started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used."

On Saturday, in an open letter to Democratic members of Congress, she announced that she was leaving the party because she felt its leaders had failed to change the country's course in Iraq.

She said that the most devastating conclusion she had reached after three years of protest, which included a trip to Cuba and the setting up of a protest camp outside Bush's Texas ranch, was that her son had died for nothing.

"I have tried ever since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful," she wrote. "Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months."

The Iraq War, now in its fifth year, has claimed the lives of more than 3,400 US soldiers, while in Afghanistan, more than 320 American troops have been killed since US-led military operations began in late 2001. Polls have shown that many Americans now think the Iraq War is going badly and favor a withdrawal of troops sometime next year.

Last week Bush signed a revised war spending bill which did not set a date for withdrawal. Democrats had earlier hoped to tie the money to a withdrawal date.

A recent CBS News/New York Times poll found that 76 percent of those surveyed said the war in Iraq was going badly, and 63 percent said there should be a timetable to withdraw US troops from Iraq sometime in 2008.

(China Daily via agencies May 30, 2007)