BRITISH forces will leave the restive Shia city of al-Amarah this month and instead patrol the Iranian border to prevent weapons-smuggling in one of the largest redeployments the Army has undertaken in Iraq.

Security duties in al-Amarah, near the Iranian border, will be handed over to Iraqi forces, freeing about 1,200 British troops to conduct long-range desert patrols, lasting several weeks, to stop arms smugglers coming from Iran, Major Charlie Burbridge told The Times yesterday.

The British troops will hand over Camp Abu Naji at the end of the month, he said. The troops will in future be based in Basra, from where they will conduct their border patrols.

The redeployment comes a month after British-led coalition forces handed over the province of Muthana, on the Saudi border, to Iraqi forces they had helped to train. Iraqi officials have also said that their forces will take over the neighbouring southern province of Dhi Qar from Italian troops this month.

“We won’t get too close to the Iranian border for obvious political reasons,” Major Burbridge said. “But we don’t have to because we know [the smugglers’] routes.”

In June 2004, eight British naval personnel were captured on the Shatt al-Arab waterway by Iranian border guards and held for several days.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador in Iraq, said last week that Iranian forces were operating inside Iraq to stir up trouble at a time when America and Britain are pressuring Tehran both over its nuclear programme and its links with the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah.

But Major Burbridge said that the British forces “have absolutely no evidence of Iranian forces operating in Iraq whatsoever”. He said the operation would focus on commercial smugglers bringing weapons across the border, some of which may ultimately be destined for southern Lebanon.

Camp Abu Naji has come under mortar attack over the past three years, often from loyalists of the renegade Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, but the British believe that Iraqi troops can control the situation in the town.

The US military is also set to hand over control to Iraqi forces today in Mahmoudiyah, a town just south of Baghdad in an area known as the Triangle of Death. Mahmoudiyah has been the scene of several massacres and bombings, and was where five US soldiers were accused this month of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl before allegedly murdering her and her family.

Iraqi forces announced yesterday that they had captured 16 members of a gang that had planned to kidnap or kill the family of Nouri al-Maliki, the Shia Prime Minister. The men were said to have confessed to planting car bombs in Baghdad, as well as murder and rape.

In the capital, US and Iraqi forces continued their massive operation to root out death squads and terrorist gangs, even as another 12 corpses were fished from the River Tigris — all either shot in the head or decapitated. Nearly 50 people were killed in Baghdad yesterday.

Coalition troops arrested five security guards from the Ministry of Health on suspicion of kidnapping and announced a four-day ban on all vehicles moving in swaths of west Baghdad, where militias have been waging a bloody sectarian war.

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