September 3, 2007
Under cover of darkness, British troops pull out of their last base in Basra city
The final 500 British troops in Basra city last night withdrew under the cover of darkness from their base, a former palace of Saddam Hussein.
The highly symbolic pullout from Basra Palace began at about 10pm local time. Residents then reported seeing helicopters overhead and a convoy of eight tanks, six Land Rovers and five other large vehicles, possibly armoured personnel carriers, approaching the main British airport base from the palace shortly before midnight.
The streets of the city were largely deserted, and the convoy of troops from the 4th Battalion The Rifles was not attacked. Troops at the palace suffered daily attacks over the summer, with nine members of The Rifles being killed since May 21.
Basra airport will now be the only base for the 5,500 soldiers still serving in southern Iraq. With the palace base handed to the Iraqis, the Government is expected to announce that the British presence in Iraq will be reduced by 500 within the next few weeks.
The British have withdrawn from Basra before the city has received “Provincial Iraqi Control” status, conferred when coalition commanders and the Iraqi Government agree that Iraqi troops on the ground are ready to assume responsibility for the city’s security. British officers say it will be weeks before troops from the Iraqi Army’s 10th Division will be able to hold their own. That means British troops will remain responsible for the security of a city from which they have withdrawn, and will have to fight their way back in if there is trouble.
The withdrawal of The Rifles battle-group from the city was intended to be carried out in total security but a senior Iraqi commander broke the news and the Ministry of Defence was forced to confirm that the pullout was under way. The MoD refused all British media requests to cover a withdrawal that many Iraqis regard as a victory for the militias.
Last week Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical clerical whose Mahdi Army has been responsible for the attacks on British troops, announced a six-month ceasefire. There have been persistent reports of the British military striking a deal with his organisation, releasing prisoners in return for safe passage out of the palace. Iraqi officials say that the British have transferred about 60 prisoners to Iraqi custody in recent days. The MoD denies that there was any deal.
British military sources said it was hoped that the withdrawal would reduce the violence in the city, as 90 per cent of the attacks had been aimed at the soldiers. But Basra residents expressed dismay at the British departure, fearing the fighting between rival militias would only intensify.
“I think there will be more bloodshed, because when the British forces were here the criminals were kidnapping and killing people, so what do you think will happen after they leave?” said Hussein Ali Wahid, 39, a bank clerk, who believes that the militias forced the British out. Osama Abed Alwadod, 41, a dentist, who also thought the militias had forced out the British, said: “There are many parties fighting for power in Basra, so the security situation will be worse. At first the British forces were doing good, but after a year civilians could see something had changed. They were starting wars with the militias. That was wrong. They should have talked, not fought with them, and that was the reason for the fall of the British forces.”
The pullout came as two of Britain’s most influential generals during the Iraq war delivered scathing attacks on the Americans for their handling of the campaign after Saddam’s defeat. Major-General Tim Cross, who supervised reconstruction projects alongside his American counterparts in 2003, joined General Sir Mike Jackson, former head of the Army, in criticising the US for ignoring British advice. General Cross, a Royal Engineer, is retired but he was a hugely respected figure in the Army and had unrivalled experience in dealing with postwar nation-building. He revealed that he gave advice to Don-ald Rumsfeld, the former US Defence Secretary, about the size of the force needed to tackle the challenges after Saddam’s downfall, but was ignored.
The attacks by General Jackson, the former Chief of the General Staff, in his autobiography, and General Cross, in an interview with the Sunday Mirror, have laid bare the anger felt by the British military over the way that Mr Rumsfeld dismissed all the warning signs of a potential disaster in Iraq.
Although much has been said about the failures of the American strategy in Iraq, not least by Sir Jeremy Green-stock, the former British Ambassador at the United Nations and later Tony Blair’s special envoy to Baghdad, the strong criticism from the two generals has added to the growing sense of a rift between Washington and London.
Mr Brown is expected to announce next month that security for Basra province is to be handed to the Iraqis by the end of the year.
William Hague, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, said that the generals’ criticisms underlined the need for a public inquiry into the war. “They [the Americans] thought it would be easier to win the peace than it was to win the war and it turned out to be the other way round,” he told Sky News.
timesonline.co.uk |
