Posted on 12/29/2003 8:50:29 AM PST by Pikamax
All quite quiet on the British front
A degree of prosperity and the troops' emollient style have made Iraq's southern zone comparatively peaceful, writes Luke Harding
Monday December 29, 2003
It is Basra's latest tourist attraction: Saddam Hussein's luxury yacht, still lying half-submerged in the city's shabby harbour. The yacht was one of the first targets in the coalition's campaign nine months ago to get rid of Saddam. But the missile failed to sink the al-Mansour - The Victory - which now lies across the Shatt al-Arab waterway, together with the rusting hulks of Iraqi gunboats sunk during the war with Iran. It is a sign of how far southern Iraq has come that Iraqi tourists were yesterday taking pleasure cruises past Saddam's ruined yacht. "I left Iraq 22 years ago because of Saddam," Mohammad Ali, a chemistry teacher going for a cruise with his Iranian wife and family, said. "I'm so happy to be back."
"The British did us a favour," he said. "They got rid of the biggest dictator in the Middle East. Basra used to be beautiful. It was full of restaurants and casinos."
In contrast to the daily mayhem in the rest of Iraq, the British-occupied south of the country is - comparatively - a tranquil place. There is violence here too - kidnappings and car-jackings by armed bandits who lurk on the road north of Basra are common; last week gunmen shot dead a Christian alcohol-seller as he went to buy vegetables in Basra's market.
But Iraq's increasingly well-organised resistance has made little effort to launch attacks on the British troops who have been encamped in Basra since June, in one of Saddam's riverside palaces, a short stroll from his un-sunken yacht. The last British soldier killed in action in Iraq died in late August.
"It's all about managing the Shia mood," Brigadier David Rutherford-Jones said last week, as his men tucked into a Christmas dinner of turkey and mince pies, served in the palace's tinsel-covered mosque. "Their expectations are very high. I sense that they are outpacing reality a little."
So far the Shia parties in Basra appear to be playing a waiting game - confident that, once the British pack up and leave, the city will be theirs. Sitting in an office decorated with posters of the recently assassinated Shia leader Mohammad Baqr al-Hakim, Abu Hamza al-Basri, spokesman for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said he had a "good relationship" with coalition forces. He was grateful they had got rid of Saddam.
The British, however, had made "mistakes", he said. They had refused to allow his party's armed wing, the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade, from taking over local security. Recently, senior Bush administration officials have admitted it will be virtually impossible to disband Iraq's militias before sovereignty is handed over to a provisional Iraqi government in July - a decision that will leave the Badr Brigade in control of Basra.
"The British are not doing enough. There is a lot of killing," Mr al-Basri complained. Other Basra residents expressed disgruntlement at the British military's failure to build a bridge over the river ("Baghdad has more bridges," one moaned) and its new get-tough policy on oil smuggling. "The British captured my tanker. It was loaded with diesel for my boat. They thought I was a smuggler," Hamid Hussein, a 29-year-old boatman offering harbour cruises, lamented.
But the reality is that the 10,000 British soldiers in Iraq are not confronting the same kind of brutal insurgency faced by the Americans further north. Iraq is now divided into three chunks - the tranquil south; Kurdistan, which has enjoyed self-government since 1991; and Baghdad and the Sunni triangle.
In the latter sector, Saddam Hussein's capture more than a fortnight ago does not appear to have discouraged the insurgents - as some observers optimistically suggested - but merely to have galvanised them. Last week, guerrillas fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the Sheraton hotel; lobbed mortars at the "green zone", the coalition's vast HQ; hit the Turkish, Iranian and German embassies; and killed four US soldiers in Bequba, north of Baghdad, using their favourite weapon, the roadside bomb.
Over the weekend, they launched a big attack in the southern city of Kabala, using suicide car bombs, killing two Thai and five Bulgarian soldiers. It was, all in all, a dismal Christmas holiday. "Down here is very different from up there," Major Charles Mayo, the British military's spokesman in Basra, said at the British base in Basra's international airport. "We have the support of the local population."
He went on: "I think that is because we talk to them. The soldiers are learning a bit of Arabic. They learn how to say things like: 'Please get out of your car.' They try to be polite."
But the success of Basra is as much the result of the city's new prosperity as of the emollient style of British troops, who patrol the rubbish-filled bazaars on foot. Across the city, posters of Saddam have been replaced by portraits of martyred Shia clerics. Since Saddam's fall, sales of satellite dishes and mobile phones - which work from the Kuwait network - have boomed. Thousands of cars arrive every day by ferry from Dubai, Qatar and Oman, along with second-hand fridges, washing machines and furniture. The electricity supply, meanwhile, is better than Baghdad's, where pylons were looted or destroyed.
"Basra is economically more important than Baghdad," Hamid Alrobai, of the Sultan Palace hotel, built four months ago, said. Given the chance, Basra would be beautiful again, Mr Alrobai said. "The problem is that Saddam stole many of the date palms and put them in his palaces."
It's not a mistake to refuse gun toting thugs who want to turn Irag into a different type of dictatorship. The same type of totalitarian regime Iranian students are protesting against.
Maybe he should start by cleaning out the bazaars.
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