Tony Blair says Iraq has made “remarkable” progress. Clusters of red on the British Army’s own maps of Basra suggest otherwise.

On military charts, significant swaths of the southern city are security coded scarlet, for unsatisfactory. Other zones are marked green, satisfactory, or amber, between the two.

Levels of violence and anticoalition attacks are far lower in the Shia-dominated south than the Sunni triangle around Baghdad. But British casualties have been increasing over the last year, with more than ten soldiers killed and 60 injured since November.

Iraqis in Basra and across southern Iraq offered a mixed reaction to the British withdrawal. Some welcomed the gradual departure of an occupying military power in a land traditionally hostile to any invader. But there was also widespread trepidation that the diminishing British presence will only cement the already tight grip that fundamentalist Shia militias hold over the south, enforcing their own hardline interpretation of Islamic religious law.

Expert View

Britain’s phased exit from Iraq has begun at an extraordinary time: security in Basra is worse now than it was three years ago

Michael Evans, Defence Editor

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Either way, the move will answer the question about whether the continuing presence of coalition troops in areas with no insurgency comparable to the north has been acting as a magnet for violence.

Followers of the radical Shia cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr — whose Mahdi Army is blamed for much of the Islamist intimidation and accused by British forces of launching many of the bomb attacks on them — predicted that Basra would soon become calm.

“The militias and militant groups in these areas only fired their weapons at the occupier and when they go, all of the violence here will end,” Salam al-Maliki, a Sadrist official, said.

Shia leaders in Baghdad, eager to fix their grip on power, applauded the announcement. “The withdrawal is the wish of the Iraqi Government and all the political powers in the country,” Sami al-Askari, an MP close to the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, said.

But in Amara, the capital of Maysan province which Britain intends to hand over to Iraqi forces within months, Jabr al-Nuaimi, 40, said he felt the British had abandoned the city to the Mahdi army since withdrawing from bases around the city last September.

“The British troops left the city under pressure from the Mahdi army because there were a lot of mortars fired at their bases,” he told The Times.

“People hoped the British would control the city with a strong hand, but in reality all they cared about was protecting themselves.”

Although the initial perception of British forces in Basra was of experienced troops putting the population at ease by patrolling in berets, instead of the more aggressive posture adopted by US forces further north, the reality has varied widely from town to town.

Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washing-ton, said the British move would simply hand more power to the Islamist groups backed by neighbouring Iran. “The British cuts will in many ways simply reflect the political reality that the British ‘lost’ the south more than a year ago,” he said.

Although there is no Sunni-Shia carnage to compare with Baghdad, the Shia-dominated south has been torn by a cutthroat internal competition for power that has turned bloody. Since August, both Diwaniyah and Amara have been convulsed by clashes between the mainly Shia Iraqi Army, and Sadr’s militia.

Basra has seen the worst of the violence. Locals believe the drive-by shootings and assassinations have been fuelled by the struggle among the city’s Shia political parties for control of the Basra region’s oil reserves. Optimists hope that the Iraqi Army, while bedevilled by the same corruption, militia infiltration and political interference as other institutions, will inspire confidence more than the militia-dominat-ed police, in a country traditionally proud of its armed forces.

Fear of militias was predominant among the concerns voiced by Iraqis in Basra yesterday. Samira Luady, 43, a post office official, said: “If we want to estimate the British performance in Basra, it was good, and the evidence of that is the stability all over the town.”

But she added: “The Iraqi police now cannot control the situation if the British troops pull out because of the weakness of these forces and the infiltration by political parties and religious groups. I don’t know if the Iraqi Army will be able to control the situation or not but I doubt it.”

Rise in attacks

- A new report says there has been a sevenfold increase in jihadist terror attacks worldwide since the invasion of Iraq

- Comparing terrorist attacks between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, and then March 21, 2003, to September 30, 2006, it found that even when Iraq and Afghanistan were excluded, attacks have increased by 300 per cent in the rest of the world

- Peter Bergen, an expert on al-Qaeda, and Paul Cruickshank, of New York University, based their report on figures provided by the Rand Corporation