He's witnessed its horrors and its rebirth: John Humphrys on the hope and despair in Basra

13 April 2012

Travel a few hours south of Baghdad, Iraqis tell you, and according to local mythology you will come to the Garden of Eden. It is where the waters of the great Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet before they flow into the Persian Gulf.

Ancient travellers who had journeyed across the hostile desert would have gazed in awe at this fertile valley; lush and green and welcoming, the cradle of humanity - or so they say.

But travel a little further south and you will come to the modern city of Basra. If the Garden of Eden was paradise on earth, Basra is hell on earth. I have just made my second visit there in two years. I left feeling a mixture of gratitude, awe and despair.

British soldiers do a demanding job in poor or deadly conditions for low pay

British soldiers do a demanding job in poor or deadly conditions for low pay

The gratitude springs from the fact that I live somewhere else. It was wonderful after this assignment to be returning home to a city in which clean water pours from the taps and a power cut is a rare event; in which we think it's too hot when the temperature passes 80f.

In Basra, 120 degrees is common at this time of year, and to step into the sunshine in the heat of the day is to open the door of an oven.

The sun is often obscured by a vicious cloud of sand and grit which scours any exposed flesh, clogs the nostrils and is so dense that it can even block the signal from your mobile phone. In my city, it is rainwater that runs down the gutters. In the poorest parts of Basra, it is raw sewage.

So much for the gratitude then. The awe is generated by the fortitude and resilience of the people who have survived here through decades of repression, corruption on a heroic scale and lethal violence.

And not just for the local people. It is hard not to be impressed by the men and women of the British armed forces who have done their best over the past five years to help protect them.

Yes, it is true that they volunteered: nobody made  them join the Army. It is also true that there are some bad officers and soldiers who have betrayed their colleagues by their brutal behaviour. There are always bad soldiers: there always will be.

But most are doing a decent job in appalling conditions for pretty low pay - and there is not so much as a cold beer to be drunk at the end of the day to reward them.

Six months is their tour of duty. Six days was more than enough for me.

British soldiers patrol the streets of Basra

British soldiers patrol the streets of Basra

But it is the despair that stays with you. Despite all the promises of reconstruction made to the people of Basra that followed the swift overthrow of Saddam Hussein, there are still precious few signs of any real improvements.

In some ways, things are worse. Talk of reconstruction rings hollow when you drive through the streets of this shattered city, stumble on the broken pavements, curse yet another power cut, recoil at the brown sludge that appears when you turn on a tap. The locals tell you it comes straight out of the filthy water of the Shat al-Arab river.

I asked one man if he drinks it. 'Drink it?' He was shocked at the very idea. 'I wouldn't let my kids wash their hands in it!'

Basra is no worse off than many other places. I have been in Third World cities that are every bit as dilapidated, and some that are much, much poorer.

Nobody is starving in Basra - but that's not the point. For unlike other benighted regions, we have made a commitment to the people of southern Iraq.

We invaded their country - for good or ill - and we made promises to them. We promised them an end to Saddam's dictatorship. They would be free - free to go about their business, free of repression and free to vote for the government of their choice.

Much of that has been delivered.

It is tempting to remember Saddam as that cowed and grubby fugitive; dragged from the hole in the ground where he tried in vain to hide from his conquerors; held in captivity and mocked when photographs were published of him; an old and frightened man in his under-pants with no dignity and the hangman's rope his only way out.

Tempting, but wrong. The memory of the Saddam years is beginning to fade, but he will never be forgotten - and every so often a throwaway remark reminds you what a monster he was.

I was wandering around one of his many palaces with a local man, glancing at the elaborately decorated frieze in one of the many vast rooms. 'I knew the men who did that,' he told me.

I thought it might be a good idea to try to talk to them, so I asked if they were still in Basra.

'No,' he said. 'Two of them painted their initials in tiny letters at the edge of the frieze when they had finished it. Saddam saw the initials when he came to inspect the work and he had the men shot.

'The palace had to be seen as Saddam's achievement, and no one else was allowed to claim any credit for the work.'

The people of Basra - most of them Shias - celebrated Saddam's downfall in 2003 and welcomed the men who brought it about. Another promise we made to them was that they would be safer under the new regime: in the heady days that followed, they were.

The British occupation of Basra was held up to the world as a model of its kind - an example of how occupying forces should behave. Not for them the heavy-handed approach of our American allies to the north.

While the Marines patrolled the streets of Baghdad in full combat gear, kicking in doors, shouting and shooting and getting shot, the British were the soft cops.

They had berets on their heads, smiles on their lips and boiled sweets in their backpacks for the children. They were the liberators, and they were treated as such.

A British soldier talks to a resident during a patrol in the Garma area North of the city of Basra

A British soldier talks to a resident during a patrol in the Garma area North of the city of Basra

Some of us who had reported from Northern Ireland more than 30 years earlier recalled a similar welcome for the British soldiers in the Roman Catholic areas of Belfast when they first arrived - cups of tea brought out for them, pats on the back - and wondered how long this similar reception in Basra would last. The answer came swiftly, delivered by extremist militias loyal to Shia hardliners and their fanatical religious leaders.

By the time I made my first visit to Basra two years after the invasion, it had become a very dangerous place indeed - especially for the British.

The militias had effectively taken control, and the British were the enemy. When they patrolled the city, they no longer ambled down the streets in soft hats and chatted to the locals; they crouched in the back of massive armoured Warriors.

Even with that sort of protection they were not safe from roadside bombs and attacks with rocket-propelled grenades. Since the start of the war, a total of 176 British military personnel have been killed in southern Iraq.

British government officials tried to run the city from their headquarters inside the Basra Palace, protected by a garrison of British soldiers. That's where I stayed - and it almost cost my producer her life.

She was inside one of the accommodation 'pods' when a rocket fell on the roof a few feet above her. Mercifully, the blast was deflected and she escaped with nothing worse than a nasty headache. That was one of about 40 rockets fired at us in 72 hours.

Less than a week after we left, the British pulled out of the palace to the relative safety of the airbase a few miles outside Basra. The long column of armoured vehicles flying the Union Jack marked a humiliating retreat. This was the low point of the occupation.

British diplomats have exchanged the opulent surroundings of Saddam's old palace for a few huts surrounded by squaddies and the smell of a sewage system that cannot quite cope with the demands made of it.

One of the huts has a small sign tacked to its door. It reads: British Embassy.
There was more humiliation to come. With the British hunkered down in the airbase, doing little more than helping to train the Iraqi security forces and protect themselves, the militias held sway.

Saddam's reign of terror had been replaced by a different version, and there seemed nothing they could do about it. They could not turn to the police force, which was itself riddled with corruption and - worse - extremists.

One British soldier told me he stopped a police car, opened the boot and found a bomb in it. He and his colleagues had been the intended target.

The aim of the militias was to turn Southern Iraq into an Islamic fundamentalist state under Sharia law. In some respects, they were worse even than Saddam. At least under his dictatorship women had more or less equal status.

No longer. If women dressed or behaved 'immodestly', they were punished - sometimes by death. The bodies of disfigured women were found in the streets, their 'crime' having been to wear Western clothes or apply a little lipstick.

There was a small but lively Christian community in Basra - thought to be the oldest in the world. It is now virtually extinct.

Canon Andrew White, the brave and dedicated Anglican leader in Iraq, told a congressional committee in Washington about a conversation he had had with one small group of Christian worshippers.

'I said to them: "Tell me what has happened over the past week." And the people went through what had happened, and I realised that 36 of my congregation had been kidnapped. None of them have been returned.'

Many others were tortured or simply murdered. By now, most have fled the country.
And then, just over three months ago, everything changed. Without the British even having been informed about it, the Prime Minister of Iraq, Nuri al-Maliki, had been discussing with the Americans in Baghdad a plan for an all-out assault on the Basra militias.

It was to be named 'Operation Charge of the Knights'. At dawn on March 25, it began.
An estimated 30,000 Iraqi troops and police, most of them trained by Coalition forces and supported from the air by the Americans, went into action.

The streets of Basra were, yet again, turned into a war zone.

Saddam defending his dictatorship

Saddam defending his dictatorship

The British heard the bombs falling from the security of their air base, but were not drawn into the fighting until the last two days of the operation.

A few weeks later, I saw for myself the effect of the operation. The militias had vanished from the streets. Local people are once again packing the cafes and restaurants at night. There is even talk of certain places where alcohol is served.

The women I saw were still wearing traditional dress, but one attractive young woman told me some of her friends were actually prepared to wear Western dress - even short skirts - without fear.

And nor were people afraid any longer to be seen talking to Westerners.

The great boast at the British Consulate was that every Iraqi they had invited to this year's party to mark the Queens' official birthday had come. The previous year, none of them did.

The last British fatality was four months ago - an RAF man killed by a 'lucky' rocket fired at the base.

During my stay there, I heard the warning sirens only once - and even then no rockets fell. The police patrolling the perimeter of the base had seen some signs of preparations for a rocket attack and phoned the base to warn them. That, in itself, was encouraging - evidence that the police are doing their job.

The only time I felt we were in any real danger was when I went out on patrol with Iraqi soldiers. My British minders were not very keen on the idea and I had to stamp my feet a bit before they would agree to let me. After a couple of hours on the streets with the Iraqis, I began to see why they'd been reluctant.

The British now patrol in armoured vehicles - big beasts called Mastiffs bought from the Americans. The soft-skin Land Rovers were finally abandoned when too many using them were killed or wounded and too many awkward questions were asked by MPs and bereaved relatives.

The Iraqis use pick-up trucks with a machine gun mounted in the rear and half a dozen soldiers, their legs often hanging nonchalantly over the tailboard. They hurtle around the streets with lots of hooting the horn and shouting at friends - like boy racers anxious to impress their girlfriends.

The sense you get is that they feel they have reclaimed their city from the foreign invaders and  the militias.

But the British are still very wary. I was told that my progress was being monitored by a drone aircraft flying high and unseen above the city.

The officers I spoke to do not really believe that the militias - the so-called Mahdi Army - were defeated. Reports from the streets at the time suggested very few of them were killed.

The assumption is that some sort of compromise was reached with the authorities and the militias live to fight another day.

Whether they will fight again - apart from the odd rocket - depends on two things: the effectiveness of the Iraqi security forces and the extent to which they can rely on the support of the local population, and especially the young men.

It is estimated that unemployment in the region is about 80 per cent. They are desperate to find work and they'll grab whatever is on offer.

I watched a gang of 200 men - some old, some young - being paid off for a few days' work by the Coalition forces.

A British colonel, who stood with me in the searing heat watching them line up for their cash, told me some of them would undoubtedly have been equally happy a few months ago to take a few dollars from the militias to loose off a rocket or two at him and his men.

But why should we worry about this? Gordon Brown may have been a little premature a year ago when he flew out to Basra and promised the withdrawal of British soldiers. By this time next year, it's unlikely there will be more than a handful left.

So why is this so worrying? One word sums it up. Oil. Basra is Iraq's only port, and Iraq is the world's third biggest oil producer. Two-thirds of Iraq's reserves sit beneath the deserts surrounding this city. If you have bought a tank of petrol in the past six months, you will know why Basra matters to all of us in the West.

The last time British forces invaded Iraq was in 1941, and the order came from Winston Churchill to the commander-in-chief in the Middle East, General Sir Archibald Wavell.

Wavell was reluctant but Churchill insisted. It was essential, he said, because Britain was fighting a war and we had to protect oil reserves vital to the British war effort.

In a world where oil prices are higher than they have ever been, the stability of Southern Iraq is still vital.

We won the war in 1945, but we are fighting a different kind of war today. This time, the outcome is much less certain.

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