America’s top military commander in Iraq acknowledged yesterday that Britain’s recent withdrawal of 500 troops from the centre of Basra and the handover of security responsibility for the city to the Iraqis had already paid dividends.

General David Petraeus, in London to meet Gordon Brown and senior Cabinet ministers, denied that there had been a spat between the United States and Britain over the withdrawal of the British troops from Basra. “I don’t know where that came from,” he said, speaking at a press conference in Whitehall before heading for 10 Downing Street.

General Jack Keane, an architect of the American surge policy of deploying 30,000 additional US troops to Baghdad, indicated recently that there was concern that a British withdrawal would lead to an increase in violence in Basra, and said there were fears that the Americans might have to backfill in the south with their own troops.

However, General Petraeus, giving the Government his own assessment of the way that things are going in the south, said that he had personally blessed the decision to pull out the remaining 500 troops from the Basra Palace base, and was pleased that it had been carried out “in an orderly way”.

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He also said that the level of violence in the city in recent weeks had dropped significantly.

However, he gave warning that the Iranians, who already have a powerful influence in the south among the Shia militia who have been attacking the British Forces, remained a cause of grave concern in the southern provin-ces, particularly in Basra.

Asked by The Times whether the interference of the Iranians in the south was the key reason for maintaining a substantial British force there, General Petraeus said he would not put it at the top of his list, but that it was one of several factors that would dictate when conditions were right for any reduction of forces. “But I wouldn’t rank it \ in any particular order,” he said. He refused to be drawn on any timetable for future British troop withdrawals.

But both he and Ryan Crocker, the US Ambassador to Baghdad, who spoke alongside the general at the press conference at the Royal United Services Institute, referred to the potential “devastating consequences” of a premature withdrawal of troops “for our two nations and the world”.

Mr Crocker said that the consequences for the Iraqi people would be severe.

Before their meeting with the Prime Minister, General Petraeus and Mr Crocker met Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the Chief of the Defence Staff. Today he is expected to see David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary.

Despite his upbeat assessment of the progress that had been made in the south, General Petraeus said that there remained serious challenges. But he was optimistic that the British would be able to hand over security control of the whole of Basra province to the Iraqis “by the fall or by winter”. The three other provinces in the south have already been transferred to Iraqi responsibility.

The four-star general who gave evidence to US Congress last week on the achievements of the US troop-surge strategy, praised the British military contribution and, in particular, noted the efforts of the special forces and two British generals, Lieutenant-General Graeme Lamb and Lieutenant-General Bill Rollo, both of whom had acted as his deputy in Baghdad.

He repeated his evidence to Congress in which he recalled that General Lamb, former Director Special Forces, had reminded him that in counter-insurgency campaigns, “you reconcile with your enemies, not with your friends”, and talked of his experiences in Northern Ireland. “He talked about how he sat across the table from . . . former IRA members who had been swinging [explosive] pipes at his lads, as he put it, just a few years earlier. That was quite instructive for us,” General Petraeus said.

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