The crowd surges forward and a dozen helmeted soldiers struggle hopelessly to contain the flood of bodies lapping around them trying to reach a container truck handing out bottled water.

The population of al-Zubayr, a town of several hundred thousand near Basra, has been without mains water since Saturday and they are desperate and determined.

Even when one young soldier from the Black Watch battle group attaches his bayonet to his rifle, alarmed by the raw power of the shouting mob, it proves to be no deterrent.

"Stay in line. Form a queue," bellows Jess Lockett, the battalion's civil-military liaison officer, perched on the rear ramp of the truck.

In front and a few feet below them, a forest of grasping hands reaches up, their owners jammed together in a solid mass. As the first cases of water are plucked out a few civilians lose their footing in the crush, falling under the heels of their fellow townsmen.

More troops arrive and a semblance of order is restored but entire cases are being hurled into the seething swarm and small skirmishes break out for possession of the bottles.

A handful of US Rangers lend a hand, but regaining the initiative proves impossible until Ali Salmen Hussein, a local who speaks English, is manhandled on to the ramp to appeal for calm.

"This is very dangerous for me," he says. "There are people who might take my co-operation with what they regard as an invading foreign army very badly."

He says that he is a college graduate in business management with a sister, Duna Magahan working as a doctor at Alexander Hospital in Birmingham and a brother Majid, also a doctor, working in London.

"I am helping because the people need food and water. Tell that to the world. And while I am grateful to the British for liberating us from Saddam's rule, I hope you go home when the war is over.

"Iraqis would resist long-term occupation. It would not matter who the liberators were. We like and appreciate freedom. We do not like foreign troops on our soil."

Al-Zubayr a sprawling town of contrasting wide boulevards, narrow alleyways and crumbling mud brick houses, has been the centre of resistance against British troops.

Sergeant John Hardy, a Scots Guardsman attached to the Black Watch battle group, says: "We have treated three kids wounded in the gunfire between our patrols and local militiamen. Two had to be picked up under automatic rifle and rocket-propelled grenade fire.

"It's like Mogadishu. Every time we turn into a street it becomes the OK Corral. Luckily, the gunmen are not very good. One opened up on me from 30 yards and missed.

"I was convinced I was going to die. He emptied a full 30-round magazine in my direction. I could hear them cracking past. But I wasn't even scratched.

"The kids we picked up had wounds in their legs and arms. The militiamen are wild. They're more enthusiastic than accurate. But people still get hit by stray rounds."

Watching the first handout of aid out of an abandoned Iraqi barracks in the west of the town, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Riddell-Webster, the battle group commander said: "It's ironic. We are providing desperately needed help to people not 200 yards from where one of our men was killed in an ambush a few nights ago. Some of those receiving water may have had a hand in that ambush.

"Looking at the numbers who have turned up and the two container loads of food and water available, it would seem like we're pissing into the wind. But we've got to convince these people that we are here to help them. We are not their enemy."

This article was a pool despatch for British media

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