A YOUNG Iraqi boy in a torn red T-shirt was the first to show his face yesterday.

He peered out from behind a gate, unsure what to do as two Royal Marine commandos strode down the muddy street towards him.

Marine Andrew Chilvers dropped to one knee, rested his machinegun on the ground and beckoned the boy. He then held out a chocolate bar. The boy hungrily tore off the wrapper, calling for his brothers and sisters to join him. Soon the 21-year-old commando from Middlesbrough was surrounded by outstretched hands. “If only winning the rest of Iraq was this easy,” he smiled.

It took five days and nights of intermittent American airstrikes and artillery bombardments to subdue this scruffy little town of 4,000 people that sits at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab waterway.

About the only time the US Marines got out of their vehicles was to raise the Stars and Stripes on the very first day, a move they were hastily ordered to reverse as it smacked of occupation, not liberation.

Then on Monday morning the British took over. It took the men of 42 Commando barely 24 hours to win over the locals and by last night their commander, Brigadier Jim Dutton, was confident they had extinguished the last flickers of resistance from Saddam Hussein’s diehard Baath party loyalists.

One senior British officer said: “The Americans don’t care for going in on foot as we do to secure a town, whether it be Belfast or Umm Qasr. They prefer to try and flatten everything in front of them which we think only scares the living daylights out of the locals, not get them on your side.”

The Royal Marines had to insist that the Americans, who are under their command in southern Iraq, did not destroy the port as it is crucial to their humanitarian operation which is already behind schedule.

The Marines’ problems are still far from over. They are unsure who might be lurking inside the mud-brick houses that fringe this troublesome port.

Most of Umm Qasr’s residents are still too timid to venture far outside their front door. Three teenagers, one wearing a Manchester United football shirt, shuffled towards a Jeep full of Marines, waved, shouted a brief welcome in English and hurried on.

The influence of Saddam Hussein remains pervasive, with huge murals of the Iraqi President on every corner. The town suffered appallingly at his hands when the allied troops abruptly pulled out after the 1991 Gulf War, and it needs to be certain this will not happen again. “Uniforms usually mean bad news for these people, so it will take time for them to trust us and see we are genuinely here to help them, not conquer them,” Major Jeff Moulton said.

Nor, for the moment, do the Marines have much to give. Promised aid shipments cannot dock because navy divers are still searching the port and its navigational approaches for booby traps and mines.

“We were truly shocked just how poor these people are. They have absolutely nothing and yet this should be a busy port,” Major Moulton said.

The other difficulty is discovering who they have to deal with in Umm Qasr. The only people who have ever had influence in the town belong to Saddam’s Baath party. If the commandos do deal with these same apparatchiks, it will do little to persuade the locals this is true regime change.

The British made a point of ensuring that one of their first violent stops in Umm Qasr was the party headquarters, the hideout of the most lethal snipers. By the time that they got inside the militia had gone, leaving behind women and children in the building that US commanders had considered bombing when their men were shot at from there.

The question that has still to be answered is why it took the Americans so long to quell what one US Marine commander had described as a little local difficulty. The military high command in Qatar is desperate to avoid recriminations, but British commanders are critical that US forces did not search the town thoroughly but instead sat on the outskirts firing artillery.

“The people are not starving. Most locals have been asking us for cigarettes, bottles of water and shoes rather than food rations,” one Marine said.

What did encourage the Marines was that many women and children were beginning to approach them, though, as one said: “This wasn’t like Kosovo, where the people were exultant at our arrival. Here it is still very restrained, as though they are very nervous.”

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