[NYTr] Brit losses soar as they prepare to leave Basra

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Independent - Aug 10, 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2851431.ece

British losses soar as they prepare to leave Basra city

By Patrick Cockburn

Two more British soldiers were killed in southern Iraq yesterday,
raising the death toll in the UK's least successful military campaign
since Suez in 1956. In both cases the British casualties were low but
British forces wholly failed to achieve their objectives.

Two Irish Guardsman were killed and two were seriously wounded in the
early hours of yesterday when their convoy was hit by a roadside bomb
near the Rumaila oilfields west of Basra. The deaths bring to 168 the
number of British personnel who have died in Iraq since the invasion in
2003.

British losses have increased as they prepare to abandon their last
base in Basra city and retreat to their frequently attacked air base on
the outskirts of the city. Here the contingent of 5,500 troops has been
hit by mortars and rockets more than 600 times in the past four months.

"Basra's residents and militiamen view this not as an orderly
withdrawal but rather as an ignominious defeat," according to a report
by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) on Basra
published in June. "Today, the city is controlled by militias,
seemingly more powerful and unconstrained than before."

British officials have privately echoed American claims that the Shia
militias in Basra and in the rest of Iraq are being manipulated and
supplied by Iran. But the three main Shia groupings in Basra, the Mehdi
Army, the Badr Organisation and Fadhila, would control most of southern
Iraq with or without Iranian aid.

"The British have basically been defeated in the south," a senior US
intelligence official was quoted as saying in Baghdad. The final
deterioration of the British position has become evident since the end
of Operation Sinbad between September 2006 and March 2007 which sought
to curb the militias and strengthen security in Basra. But from March
on the militias have reasserted their hold on the city and killed 30
British soldiers between April and July, making it the deadliest period
for British forces at any time since 2003.

The increase in attacks may be because the militias see the British as
being on the run, but also because of the growing military friction
between the Shia militiamen and the occupation forces in general.

Lt-Gen Raymond Odierno, the US deputy commander in Iraq, says Shia
militants were responsible for 73 per cent of the attacks that killed
or wounded American soldiers in Baghdad in July. The increase in Shia
attacks on British personnel may be part of the same pattern.

The US has been seeking to blame the escalation of Shia militia attacks
on Iran but it is more likely that they are the result of growing
frustration of the Shia, who make up 60 per cent of the Iraqi
population, at what they see as increasing US support for the Sunni.

The Pentagon and White House have launched a campaign to persuade the
media that Iran's provision of sophisticated shaped charges is a
decisive factor in the war and is causing numerous US casualties. The
accusation is denied by Iran and, even if true, the provision of a
single type of explosive device is unlikely to be of critical
significance in such a complex struggle.

British forces have already withdrawn from three of the four provinces
in southern Iraq saying they are turning over security to Iraqi
government authority. But police and army in Basra and southern Iraq
are largely under the control of militias.

The outlook for the two million people in Basra, Iraq's second largest
city, is not good. According to the ICG report, violence in the city
has little to do with sectarianism or anti-occupation resistance but
involves "the systematic misuse of official institutions, political
assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighbourhood vigilantism... together
with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with
political actors."