Basra handover - the inside story

Last Modified: 16 Dec 2007
By: Nick Paton Walsh

Question: When is a "withdrawal" not a "retreat", or anything negative, for that matter? Answer: when it's a "tactical repositioning". Nick Paton Walsh blogs from Basra.

We've been on the British airbase in Basra now for 48 hours, having the delicate nature of UK military operations here explained to us in painstaking detail, with a dollop or two of spin. It's been an impressive attempt to completely reconfigure the slow departure from here as a success. But few of us on this media tour have really been won over.

What's really happening is more or less beyond debate. After 56 months the British army has realised that it causes far too many problems by going into Basra city and has opted to stay in the airport.

From today, they will need Iraqi legal permission to mount any military interventions. Soon there will be 2500 of them, which defence secretary Des Browne once said would not be enough to intervene anyway. At the level, our presence here - something made deeply hazardous by the almost daily rocket attacks that send UK troops diving to the floor or into their concrete walled beds - is almost pointless expenditure and risk.

The local militia - now dominated by the Mahdi Army - pretty much run the town. We, the UK, are withdrawing because we can no longer function in the province and the political and domestic appetite for this operation has evaporated. That feels like a "retreat", however much our military spokespeople and minders wince when we use the word.

As usual, it's the soldiers who are left with the job of passing off the politician's whimsy as success. It's been a difficult task for them: trying to show us how good security in Basra is without actually being able to take us there.

They've shown us the Iraqi troops they are training furiously to take over the province: a training exercise that was a terrific display of doors being smashed down and shouting, somewhat undermined by the admission the British trainers have never seen these same men in action on the streets of Basra. The commanding officer admitted some of them have trouble getting paid.

Having seen in March how some Iraqi Army behaved on the streets of Baghdad in the presence of an American company - looting, threatening locals, trashing homes - I'm not that optimistic for their professional standards, even though the UK commander in charge of their training said he'd yet to hear of any problems at all, really.

They've shown us how they can patrol around the base and hand out winter supplies like fuel. That particular journey took us with a few armoured vehicles to a village of Marsh Arabs. They live very near the airbase where the British reside and are vital allies in ensuring insurgents don't get a few good pot shots into the base. We watched them try to give the aid out.

The local sheikh was not there, so a fight broke out between the elderly ladies who wanted blankets. I understood the UK troops frustration at not being able to do much at all, bar stand by, look on and 'tsk tsk'. They couldn't bring enough blankets for everyone and lacked the authority locally - or the will, or even mandate - to intervene and impose order.

When the rocket attack alarm sirens sound on the base, you really understand the threat British troops live under. The advice is drop immediately to the floor. For about 30 minutes you hear regular thuds, bangs and jets roar overhead. Sometimes, they say, it happens all day. Even being out here in the desert, in a base, behind endless fences and defence systems, is no guarantee of security.

The carefully managed exit that we are here to witness is a masterful exercise in not admitting defeat. All occupations - or liberations, or assistance forces - end at some point: that's just how it is and always has been. This one is ending - in fact it has pretty much already come to an end, what remains being a slow and defiant statement of stubbornness.

The military we are with are furious at the use of the word "retreat", or withdraw, as any soldier might be. But that is what is happening, for reasons that are logical, if not morally flawed, given the lawless and chaotic Iraq being left behind and the anthems of human rights and democracy the Coalition sang as it invaded.

It is uncomfortable to watch soldiers who one would normally view as Britain's straightest-talkers carefully double-speak around the slow, inevitable, but unnecessarily chaotic demise of Britain's operations in Iraq.