British Basra pull-out cuts attacks dramatically
Attacks have plunged by 90% in southern Iraq since Britain withdrew its troops from the main city of Basra, their commander has said.
Their presence in central Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, was the single largest trigger for violence, Major General Graham Binns said.
“We thought, ’If 90% of the violence is directed at us, what would happen if we stepped back?”’ Gen. Binns said.
About 500 British troops moved out of one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces in the heart of Basra in early September, joining some 4,500 at a garrison at an airport on the city’s edge.
Since then there has been a “remarkable and dramatic drop in attacks,” Gen. Binns said in an interview in Baghdad yesterday.
“The motivation for attacking us was gone, because we’re no longer patrolling the streets,” he said.
Last spring, British troops’ daily patrols through central Basra led to “steady toe to toe battles with militias fighting some of the most tactically demanding battles of the war,” Gen. Binns said. Now British forces rarely enter the city centre, an area patrolled only by Iraqis.
The majority of attacks now target Iraqi forces, but overall violence now is still a tenth of what it was in May and June.
“They’re increasingly in the frame, more at risk, as they take over more responsibility,” Gen Binns said of his Iraqi counterparts.
British forces are scheduled to return control of Basra province back to Iraqi officials next month, officially ending Britain’s combat role in Iraq.
“We’ve been in that de facto role since we moved out of the palace…but we hope the transfer will symbolise the end of a period many in Basra city perceived as occupation,” Gen. Binns said.
With an overwhelmingly Shiite population, Basra has not seen the level of sectarian violence that has torn Iraq apart since the February 2006 bombing of a Shiite shrine north of Baghdad.
But it has seen major fighting between insurgents and coalition troops, as well as between Shiite militias vying for control of the city and its security forces.
A spike was expected in such “intra-militia violence” after they pulled back from the city’s centre, and were surprised to find none, gen. Binns said.
“That’s because the Sadrist militia is all powerful here – more powerful than Badr. If Badr was allowed to take on JAM in Basra, they’d lose pretty quickly,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
The Badr Brigade is a rival militia tied to Iraq’s largest Shiite party, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council. The two militias have fought open street battles, most recently in the Shiite holy city of Karbala.
Britain has been talking with members of al-Sadr’s militia since before this past summer, Gen Binns said, in hopes of bringing them into the political process in Basra.
Last month, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that Britain will halve its remaining troop contingent in Iraq next spring, bringing the number of troops down to 2,500. The scaling back of forces has already begun, and by the year’s end Britain will have 4,500 troops based mainly at Basra’s airport.
British officials have also said they cannot guarantee that any troops will remain in Iraq by the end of 2008.
