In the stifling heat the klaxon blasts out its warning. All around off-duty
soldiers drop what they’re doing and dive to the ground, ramming helmets on
their heads and struggling into body armour.
At the British base in Basra airport, the klaxon means only one thing:
incoming rockets. For long seconds the soldiers hug the ground, waiting for
the explosion, hoping it won’t be them. “[There’s] no overhead protection,”
said one officer in an e-mail. “So if you are unlucky, then nothing is going
to save you.”
The blast hits and the soldiers dash for concrete bunkers, or anywhere
offering more protection than the flimsy tents that are their home. More
rockets may be on their way.
The base has become a shooting gallery for Iraqi insurgents. British forces
are housed in tents, many near the airport tower which is visible from well
beyond the heavily defended airport perimeter. Insurgents using 107mm or
120mm rockets, fired from old drainpipes or other makeshift launchpads,
simply aim at the tower and hope to cause mayhem in the camp.
In the first three years of the base, only 45 attacks using IDFs - indirect
fire mortars or rockets - hit the airport. But in the past two months more
than 300 have struck. For the 5,000 British personnel on the base it’s a
daily dice with death.
“With up to 30 attacks some days, people are relying on luck to save them,”
said the officer in his e-mail. “Aircraft are having to be evacuated on a
regular basis and it’s only a matter of time before one is hit. Helicopters
parked on the pan were hit recently.”
It’s even more dangerous beyond the perimeter. Convoys have to resupply the
only other British outpost left in southern Iraq - the Basra Palace, which
lies a few miles south in the city.
Some 700 British troops are still holed up there and need food, fuel,
ammunition and other equipment. As the convoys run the gauntlet of the city
streets, they come under assault on all sides. “Last time we did it the
convoy encountered 25 IEDs [improvised explosive devices],” said
Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Sanders of 4 Rifles. “The Jam [the soldiers’ name
for the Mahdi Army insurgents] see the trucks form up, they know the routes
in, they know the routes out. It’s a f****** nightmare.”
There is no respite inside the palace either. Stretch Armstrong, a soldier in
the palace, found himself under such bombardment that he wrote to a company
that supplies “Baldrick’s bullets” - a real bullet engraved with the owner’s
name to keep them safe. The idea came from the television series Blackadder
in which the character Baldrick reckoned that “if there is a bullet with
your name on it”, you’d be safe if you owned it.
Armstrong wrote: “Get it in the post quick, had 30 IDF on this location
yesterday, my time may be running out.”
He got his bullet. Not long afterwards another rocket landed and he recorded:
“Had a direct hit from a 107 rocket on my bed space at Basra Palace. I got
away with burns and ringing in the ears . . . no doubt the grim reaper tried
to get me, but was seen off by the bullet!”
Many have not been so lucky. This year 41 British soldiers have been killed in
Iraq. At the present rate of attrition, more will die this year than the 53
killed in 2003.
The rocket attacks are not yet the main cause of British deaths, with most
soldiers still killed on patrol or the near-suicidal resupply runs to the
Basra Palace. Last week four soldiers were killed, two by a roadside bomb,
one shot in his Warrior armoured vehicle, and one shot patrolling the
airport.
However, the rockets have undoubtedly caused a dramatic rise in soldiers who
are seriously or very seriously wounded. Already this year more than 50 have
suffered life-threatening wounds - more than the total in the past two years
put together.
It is all part of an escalating campaign by insurgents who want to drive the
British out and be seen to do it. In the words of one officer, the British
“have become the problem rather than the solution”, with more than 90% of
the violence in and around Basra aimed at them. The anarchy has prompted
talk of losing the fight. Last week a senior US intelligence officer in
Baghdad was reported in The Washington Post as saying: “The British have
basically been defeated in the south.”
It was a claim that infuriated Air Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, chief of the
defence staff, who issued an angry rebuttal. “Our mission there was to get
the place and the people to a state where the Iraqis could run that part of
the country if they chose to and we're very nearly there,” he said.
“Our mission was not to make the place look like somewhere green and peaceful
because that was never going to be achievable in that timescale, and in any
event only the Iraqis can fulfil that aspiration.”
Who is right? Is it defeat, or partial success, and where did the original
high hopes go so wrong? AT the end of the 2003 war, the British cut their
forces in Iraq to 18,000 spread around several bases in the four southern
provinces of Basra, Dhi Qar, Maysan and Muthanna. Within a year that figure
was reduced to 8,600.
There was much talk about how the British task in Iraq would be far easier
than that of the Americans, who soon faced a wide-ranging insurgency. The
British, with their “hearts and minds” expertise, were projected by a number
of influential US officers as the experts on counterinsurgency. But doubts
have grown, even among admirers. Colonel John Nagl, author of Learning to
Eat Soup with a Knife, a book that compared the US failure in Vietnam with
the British success in Malaya, is one of the most influential of a number of
US officers who tout British counterinsurgency methods as the way ahead. His
foreword to the new US army counterinsurgency manual is published by the
journal of the Royal United Services Institute this month.
Though Nagl refuses to join those American voices who criticise the British,
he believes the coalition as a whole made serious mistakes from the start.
One of the key errors, he says, was staying in big bases and failing to
provide security for the population around the clock.
“You can’t commute to this war,” Nagl said on Friday. “You can’t live in large
bases and not go out at night and then expect the people to provide you with
the information you need to win. The people know the insurgents. They are
often tied to them through blood or marriage or long association. If they
are seen talking to the security forces during the day they will get a visit
from the insurgents at night.” The result was that with no other way of
protecting their families many ordinary Iraqis were easy recruits for the
militias, swelling their numbers and fuelling the insurgency.
“Everyone must join a political party,” said one Iraqi who joined the Mahdi
Army. “No one can remain independent. You have to belong to a party to enjoy
its support and protection from others.”
In late 2005, the British compounded this situation. With public opposition to
the war widespread in Britain and the numbers of British dead rising
steadily towards 100, pressure from London led commanders to scale back on
patrols in Basra. Some officers say they simply did not have the troops to
do the job properly.
“There is no question that we have made mistakes in Iraq,” one officer said.
“But the fact is that since day one we have been underresourced. We have
until recently had more troops based in Northern Ireland than in Basra.”
Last year the force in Iraq was further reduced to about 7,200 in the
misplaced hope that British troops could concentrate on operations in
Afghanistan. THE security vacuum left militias and other factions free to
fight it out for control of the city and the region’s oilfields. Radical
Shi’ite groups have enforced strict adherence to Islamic law, including
prohibition of alcohol. Women have been forced to wear the hijab and most of
Basra’s minority Sunni community has been driven out by the Shi’ite majority.
The main struggle for control of Basra is between supporters of Moqtada
al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army is behind the bulk of the attacks on the British;
the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), which is Iraq’s
largest Shi’ite political party and has its own militia, the Badr Corps; and
Fadhila, a breakaway Sadrist political party formed around supporters of an
independent southern state controlling the local oilfields.
While the British focused on training the Iraqi army and Iraqi police to take
over when they left, the militias increasingly called the shots. In late
2006, the British launched Operation Sinbad to clear out militia elements
from the police. The militias were temporarily subdued but resumed their
sway once the operation came to an end. They are now jockeying for power in
preparation for the British withdrawal.
The increasing number of rocket attacks on Basra Palace and the airport base
are part of that process. British commanders believe that it will continue
and probably intensify until the British leave. One senior officer put it
bluntly: “It is very clear that it is only going to get worse.”
The remaining British force of 5,500 has little choice now but, in Nagl’s
words, to commute to war or hunker down.
There are few British soldiers in Basra who can’t wait for the Iraqi army to
take over, thus enabling the British to claim mission accomplished and
depart. But when Gor-don Brown met President George W Bush in Washington
last month, he apparently agreed to put plans to withdraw on hold for a
month.
The Americans do not want any suggestion of the British “cutting and running”
before General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, makes a report to
Congress on September 15.
Meanwhile British soldiers continue to die. Delays are bound to lead to more
casualties. It is hardly surprising that morale is suffering. “People are
under enormous stress and pressure at the moment,” one officer said. “There
is a strange atmosphere at the palace. Everyone wants to go. But at meals
and over cups of tea it is not a subject that is discussed.
“I think subconsciously many people feel that we have been forced out. From my
perspective, that is not the case. We have liberated the people from Saddam,
trained the Iraqi army and delivered the people their own security forces.
It is now up to them to step forward and win the support of their own
people.”
When or even if that will happen remains unclear. Nor is it clear whether the
Americans might move in to take control themselves. The Ministry of Defence
clings to its insistence that withdrawal will be “conditions based” - only
when the Iraqis are ready to take over.
But the militias know the British are leaving and every rocket they fire is a
step closer to what might be, in Stirrup’s view, mission accomplished, but
to many others will appear to be a bloody defeat.
What happened the last time Britain left?
British forces arrived in the Mesopotamian region, later to become modern
Iraq, in 1914 to protect oil interests there during the first world war.
International agreements, and the surrender of the Ottoman empire,
subsequently led to the British controlling the region.
In 1920 the Arab nationalists in the south, who had been promised
independence, rose in rebellion after being excluded from power. Britain had
instead favoured an administration made up of colonial ministers.
In response to the rebellion, the occupying forces suppressed insurgents and
handed more power to the local military dominated by the Sunni elite.
However, fighting continued and the cost of the occupation soared. Some
3,000 British troops died. The British government came under increasing
domestic pressure to withdraw.
It proved to be far from easy to extricate British forces. Attempts to reduce
the number of British soldiers were simply followed by more civil violence.
Britain ended up granting independence to the modern state of Iraq in 1932,
yet retaining military bases in the country.
An unsteady monarchy ensued until Britain again occupied the country during
the second world war. After the war the monarchy was restored and the
British finally extricated themselves, only for the monarchy to be
overthrown by a coup. A series of dictators followed, culminating in 1979 in
Saddam.
Public wants troops home
Attitudes to Britain’s involvement in Iraq have hardened, with most people
believing troops should be brought home, according to a YouGov poll of
nearly 2,000 people for The Sunday Times.
By 53% to 15%, people believe British forces are failing to make Basra safe.
There is even more scepticism about the success of the American troop surge
in Baghdad: by 61% to 7% people think it is failing. Reports that US
officials believe Britain has been defeated in Basra drew an angry response.
By 66% to 11% respondents said Iraq’s problems were mainly due to American
incompetence.
Nearly a third of people, 29%, say British troops should be brought home
immediately and 45% say most should be withdrawn now and the rest within a
year.
