The road from Basra: to some a handover, to many a retreat

Peter Beaumont
Tuesday September 4, 2007
The Guardian

".......Yesterday the British soldiers followed the same route, as they retreated from Basra Palace in the city centre to relocate to the airbase outside the city - several miles and a whole culture away. As they left, Gordon Brown and senior officers denied it was a retreat. But for many it was a defeat all the same. Among them the residents of Basra who tired quickly of the British presence.

"We are pleased that the Iraqi army are now taking over the situation. We as an Iraqi people reject occupation. We reject colonialism. We want our freedom," one resident Rudha Muter told the Associated Press......

With Shia resistance to the occupation gaining pace across Iraq, the political parties and their armed enforcers, starting in the holy cities of Kerbala and Najaf, engaged in a Shia political turf war which gradually transformed the city's politics. As the parties fought, and fractured, the fight for Basra and the south came to resemble a gangland war.

And in that war - as British generals acknowledged last year - British soldiers were caught in a crossfire where killing British troops was the quickest way for a faction to establish its militant credentials as anti-occupation and therefore deserving of political respect and authority. Soldiers based within Basra Palace, or employees of NGOs based nearby, would describe the constant barrage of mortars and rockets into the British positions.......

More than two-thirds of the public think British troops are losing the war in Iraq, and more than half believe the war is already lost, according to the results of a poll released last night. A total of 42% of those questioned said UK forces should be withdrawn as soon as possible, and 33% said their presence in the country was making the security situation worse, according to a survey for the BBC's Newsnight."