First Lieutenant Yasser Ahmed Rassol is another young Iraqi army officer in training. He was sent in a group of 40 students on a 13-week course at the Infantry Battle School at Brecon, in Powys. His English is good. “We learnt to fight in built-up areas,” he said. He will soon graduate as a company commander.

The academy was built by the British Army in 1924 and has now been restored by Britain. When I visited it in 2004 it was just a building site. Now it is the best training school in Iraq and is known among the British officers as Sandhurst in the Sand. It has begun to produce 600 young officers a year. Some 250 have already graduated and are out in the field commanding platoons.

The academy has already held two passing out parades. According to Colonel Maurice Sheen, a member of the coalition training team, “parents are often in tears at the parades. They say, ‘Thank you for what you have done for my son’.”

I made a brief visit to Iraq last week with General Sir Mike Jackson, the chief of the general staff. This was his seventh trip to Iraq since the war and his last as CGS. He retires in July.

I came away convinced that the British contribution to Iraq is still both vital and useful.

The terrorists are trying to frighten us and the Americans away by their hideously brutal and often indiscriminate attacks, but they promise the Iraqi people only bloodshed and barbarism. The coalition, on the other hand, is helping the vast mass of the Iraqi people to build a better future.

The new Iraqi army is, for obvious reasons, vital to the new Iraq. As it grows, so the American and British-led coalition can hand over more and more of the country.

We also visited the Iraqi 10th Division headquarters outside Basra. The transformation of the division has been extraordinary. Jackson met Major- General Abdul al-Lateef Thuban Mohammed, its commander, whom he has talked to regularly since 2004.

Recruits to the army and police are being targeted by the terrorists, said Lateef, “because the terrorists know we are the armed fist that can destroy them”.

The division’s equipment is still modest but officers proudly showed off newly delivered Polish armoured cars named Hogs. (Poland has greatly increased its international profile as an important member of the coalition.) Lateef sends his men out on patrol in Basra every day. When a British helicopter was shot down on May 6, killing all five Britons aboard, a mob of about 200 people gathered around the wreckage. That was the bad news. The good news was that soldiers from the 10th Division were immediately sent to drive back the crowd and secure the area.

Lateef spoke with clear pride of what he and other officers had achieved so far. “The Iraqi army is for all Iraqis,” he said.

The hope is that whereas Saddam Hussein’s army was a compulsory instrument of oppression, the new army will be seen as a symbol of national unity.

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