Five Iraqis detained in 1,000-strong raid

More than 1,000 British and Danish troops stormed five houses in southern Iraq today, using ground forces, boats, helicopters and jets in a raid that detained five Iraqis and confiscated a large cache of weapons.

The forces fought Iraqis using small arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades and a roadside bomb during the raid in the Hartha area on the outskirts of Basra, which began at 3am local time, causing no coalition or civilian casualties, said British Maj. Charlie Burbridge, spokesman for the coalition in southern Iraq.

He would only identify the five detained Iraqis as members of “a rogue, breakaway element” of one of the many Shiite militias operating in the area and said it was unclear if the militants suffered any casualties.

Burbridge called it the largest search and detention operation that coalition forces had conducted in southern Iraq since the war began in March 2003. It surpassed earlier ones during which about 250 soldiers have quickly raided single targets identified by coalition intelligence reports, he said.

Today’s raid on houses in five different locations involved Danish soldiers arriving from the North and British ones with armoured vehicles arriving from the South, Burbridge said.

Other British forces reached the area on boats travelling to the junction of the Garmat Ali River and the Shatt al-Arab waterway in an operation that was supported by helicopters and jets, he said.

Two large mosques are located near one of the houses that was searched, but the raid ended long before residents began to travel to them today, the day of worship in mostly Muslim Iraq, said Capt. Tane Dunlop, another spokesman for multinational forces in Basra, the city in southern Iraq where most British forces are based.

The arms cache found in one of the houses included Chinese Katyusha rockets, roadside bombs, rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, indicating the Iraqis involved were carrying out a variety of attacks in the area, Dunlop said.

He said the raid involved more than 800 British troops and about 200 Danish ones.

The Danish forces are based in Shaiba, a military base south of Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, 340 miles south-east of Baghdad, Dunlop said.