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Lt. Col. Tim Collins 20 March 2003 With one phrase, Lt. Col. Tim Collins, commander of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish, summed up the task in hand for the British forces waiting to remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq. Collins was addressing his 800 men, an arm of Britain's 16 Air Assault Brigade, at Fort Blair Mayne, a Kuwaiti desert camp 20 miles south of the Iraqi border. Here is as much of his extraordinary speech as has been reported. "We go to liberate not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering...

Call to prayer revived by troops By Sarah Oliver In southern Iraq It is a sound which has echoed down the centuries but which has not been heard here for 15 years - the wailing call to prayer. On Friday however, at 0430 (0130 GMT), in the minutes before the desert dawn, the voice of the Imam rang out. What Saddam's Baath party had forbidden, the British Army had restored. The townspeople, whose mosque was destroyed years ago, prayed in the privacy of their own homes. But instead of their worship being a secret and dangerous thing, it was...

<p>The eve of battle is a time for commanders to rally their troops. Some do it more memorably than others. Following are excerpts from a speech by Lt. Col. Tim Collins, commander of the First Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, delivered last Wednesday at Fort Blair Mayne in northern Kuwait, before the battalion left for Iraq.</p>

GULF WAR II: Brit support grows for conflict + Officer reveals brutality LT COL TIM COLLINS: Reveals his battle to lift Iraq's shadow of tyrannyTO THE RESCUE: US marine carries tot to safety after Iraqis fire on civiliansTO LOVING CARE: Forces doc cradles tot A SMILING teenage girl who waved at patrolling British soldiers and accepted a big-hearted squaddie's gift of chocolate was HANGED by agents of Saddam. The butchers of the dictator's corrupt Ba'ath party had spied on the Muslim youngster from an alleyway in Az Zubayr near Basra. Battle-hardened troops of the 1st Batallion, The Royal Irish Regiment...

Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins Speech to the Royal Irish Battle Group:Imagine you are cooking in the heat and sun, as afraid as you can be, knowing you are about to fight, perhaps to kill, perhaps to die. Your commander says this: The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his Nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction. There are many regional commanders who have stains on their souls and they are stoking the fires of Hell for Saddam. As they die they will know their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity....

LONDON -- Tim Collins, a 42-year-old lieutenant colonel in the British army, has become a media hero, famous not for deeds performed in battle in Iraq but for words delivered to his men before they moved against the forces of Saddam Hussein. Collins, commander of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment, addressed his troops at their camp in Kuwait. His words, which reportedly had many of his men close to tears, left admirers calling to mind President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the "band of brothers" speech by William Shakespeare's Henry V character before the 1415 Battle of...

The Second Gulf War has already produced its first great work of oratory, a battlefield speech that could stand, in an unassuming way, alongside Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Churchill’s inspiring wartime rhetoric. A century hence, people will still be reading the speech written by Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins, the 42-year-old commander of The Royal Irish battle group, which he delivered to his troops in Kuwait on Wednesday afternoon, just hours before they went into battle. Colonel Collins has a history degree, but does not look like a poet. Readers of The Times will have seen his photograph, in shades and combat...