Irak 270

Iraq: the legacy - Ill equipped, poorly trained, and mired in a 'bloody mess'

In the fourth part of our series, Richard Norton-Taylor explains how
the six-year conflict in Iraq tested the capacity and bravery of
British troops to the limit - and how they were betrayed by the
politicians

     * Richard Norton-Taylor
     * The Guardian,


It was their first day in Basra. The summer of 2007. A company of
British soldiers were engaged in a four-hour gun battle on the city's
streets against the Mahdi army, the militia of the Shia cleric
Moqtada al-Sadr. Two of the soldiers were killed. The troops were so
ill-equipped, so inadequately trained, that there was no way of
communicating with them, according to their commander, Colonel
Patrick Sanders.

For more than four months, his troops, 4th Battalion The Rifles, were
holed up in the Basra Palace, a Saddam-built fortified area near the
Shatt al-Arab waterway. They faced daily attacks surrounded, as MPs
on the Commons defence committee described it, "like cowboys and
Indians". The besieged troops were supplied by British soldiers in
their base at Basra airport going on what Kevan Jones, now a defence
minister, called "nightly suicide missions".

By September that year, 2007, British and Iraqi military commanders
had had enough. British troops had become a magnet for Iraqi
insurgents, many of them armed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
Amid recriminations still echoing around the corridors of Whitehall
and Washington, British soldiers said they were only staying in
southern Iraq "because of our relations with the US". Their
commanders struck a deal with Mahdi militia leaders. "It was the high
point of ignominy," says Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Queen Mary
College, London University. British military officials say it was in
everybody's interest that their troops left Basra as soon as possible. 

Lees verder: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/17/iraq-war-british-army