Our troops had few friends in Basra

By Patrick Cockburn

".....The British Army in Basra was never able to gain full control of the whole city. One intelligence officer who spent a long time in Basra said the problem for the Army there was that it had no real allies. "We used to patronise the Americans and say we had long experience of counter-insurgency gained in Malaya and Northern Ireland," he said. "But in those places we had the backing of a large part of the local population, while in Basra nobody really supported us."

For years, Tony Blair and a succession of defence ministers spoke of training Iraqi forces, but the central problem was not military expertise but loyalty. Many Iraqi police was in league with militias, either because they were paid or intimidated or for patriotic reasons. On one official British Government press tour, a supposedly pro-British police chief would only meet visiting journalists at night in a warehouse away from his station, and then only on condition that officers he worked with were not told he had done so......"