  A comprehensive model, called ECOMB, is proposed to describe multiparticle
production by soft interaction. It incorporates the eikonal formalism, parton
model, color mutation, branching and recombination. The physics is conceptually
opposite to the dynamics that underlies the fragmentation of a string. The
partons are present initially in a hadronic collision; they form a single,
large, color-neutral cluster until color mutation of the quarks leads to a
fission of the cluster into two color-neutral subclusters. The mutation and
branching processes continue until only $q\bar q$ pairs are left in each small
cluster. The model contains self-similar dynamics and exhibits scaling behavior
in the factorial moments. It can satisfactorily reproduce the intermittency
data that no other model has been able to fit.
