Fewer British troops patrol Basra after rescue row
British troops in the tense southern Iraqi city of Basra greatly reduced their presence in the streets today, apparently responding to a call from the provincial governor to sever co-operation until London apologised for storming a police station to free two British soldiers.
For the second day in a row, no British forces were seen accompanying Iraqi police on patrols of Basra, as they routinely had in the past.
Elsewhere, a roadside bomb hit a US convoy in southern Baghdad, killing one soldier and wounding six; a car bomb wounded another American soldier outside the capital; and suspected insurgents gunned down at least eight Iraqis in four separate attacks today.
In New York, Iraq’s foreign minister said insurgents were likely to step up attempts to disrupt next month’s referendum on the country’s new constitution, and that the next three months are critical for the country’s future.
“Nowhere are the goals of freedom, democracy and progress more at stake,” Hoshyar Zebari told UN Security Council members at an open meeting yesterday. “We know our clear way forward, but we need your help. We need the help of every member nation and this organisation to win this fight. We stick together, or we lose together.”
In Baghdad today, Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie called Monday’s attack by British forces on a police station in Basra “a flagrant violation of Iraqi sovereignty”.
The fighting also raised new concerns about the power that radical Shiite militias with close ties to Iran have developed in the region around the southern city of Basra, questions about the role of Britain’s 8,500-strong force in Iraq and doubts about the timetable for handing over power to local security forces.
Yesterday, hundreds of Iraqi civilians and policemen, some waving pistols and AK-47s, rallied in Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, to denounce “British aggression” in the rescue of two British soldiers.
Basra Gov. Mohammed al-Waili, who has called the attack “barbaric” and a product of imperial arrogance, threatened to end all cooperation with British forces unless Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government apologised for the deadly clash with Iraqi police.
Several hours after the protest, Basra’s provincial council held an emergency meeting and voted unanimously “to stop dealing with the British forces working in Basra and not to cooperate with them because of their irresponsible aggression on a government facility.”
Britain defended the raid.
There has been disagreement about just what happened late Monday, when British armour crashed into a jail to free two British soldiers who had been arrested by Iraqi police and militiamen.
Earlier that day, a crowd attacked British troops with stones and Molotov cocktails. At least five Iraqis were killed in the violence and others wounded, police said.
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari repeated assurances that the troubles in Basra would not cause a rift between the British contingent and the Iraqi security forces.
“I do not think that this will be an obstacle that cannot be overcome,” al-Jaafari said today at a Baghdad news conference after returning from Britain, where he and Defence Secretary John Reid sought to defuse tension.
The prime minister said he would be meeting with British Ambassador William Patey to “look into what has happened”.
For his part, al-Jaafari said: “I will look closely at this matter, at what has really happened concerning the British side and the Iraqi side.”
Al-Jaafari also again criticised Syria for doing too little to control the border with Iraq.
“The restoration and improvement of Iraqi-Syrian relations depends specifically on Syria’s commitment and cooperation in securing the border,” he said.
The United States and Baghdad have repeatedly charged that Syria allows foreign fighters to cross the border to join the Iraqi insurgency and provides sanctuary for militants who operate inside Iraq. Syria says it is doing all it can to control the frontier and denies giving comfort to insurgents or foreign fighters.
Iraq’s state minister for the national security, Abdul Karim Al-Enizi, told reporters the Iraqi Cabinet has formed a committee to investigate Monday’s violence in Basra.
But the provisional council demanded that Britain apologise to Basra’s citizens and police and provide compensation for the families of people killed or wounded in the violence. The council also said it would punish employees who had not tried to defend the Basra police station from the British military attack.
The unanimous vote threatened to worsen the increasingly volatile atmosphere in Basra, where the British had prided themselves on their good relations with the Iraqi authorities.
Still, apart from the police patrols, it remained unclear what the council’s vote to stop co-operating with the British would mean in practice.
In Baghdad, the roadside bomb in Baghdad that killed one US soldier and wounded six exploded at 7.30pm Irish time yesterday in the Dora section of Baghdad, said Sgt. 1st Class David Abrams of the US Army. The residential area of the capital has been the site of many attacks by insurgents against American forces and Iraqi police.
Abrams said he could not immediately identify the victims of the attack or their unit.
The US military also said that an American soldier died last night of injuries sustained in a vehicle accident near Kirkuk. No details of what had happened were provided.
The two deaths raised the US death toll since the start of the war to 1,909.
Also today, a bomb hidden in a parked car exploded near a US military convoy on a road about 11 miles south of Baghdad, slighting wounding one soldier, Abrams said.
Near the northern city of Kirkuk, a bomb damaged an oil pipeline, sending plumes of black smoke and fire up into the air, officials said. The bomb, which exploded late yesterday, was placed beneath the aboveground pipeline, which connects the Bay Hassan oil fields with Kirkuk in northern Iraq, said police Brig. Sarhad Qadir.
Officials in Iraq’s Northern Oil Company said the heavily-damaged pipeline would be repaired within five days.
Insurgents frequently target the oil pipelines as part of their campaign against the Iraqi government and the US-led coalition, and continuing sabotage of oil installations often halt oil exports from northern Iraq to neighbouring Turkey.
Iraq’s current oil exports of about 1.6 million barrels a day mostly go through its southern ports, which have suffered far fewer insurgent attacks.
Elsewhere, scattered violence, often by suspected insurgents conducting drive-by shootings, continued in the capital and other areas of the country, as they do nearly every day.
Unidentified men in a speeding car used machine guns to kill Col. Fadil Mahmoud Mohammed, a local police commander, and his driver Thursday morning as they drove on a highway in a town near Baquba, a city north of Baghdad, police said.
Six people also were killed in the capital, including a man and two of his sons whose home in the New Baghdad area was raided by about 25 gunmen dressed in police uniforms and black masks, said police Col. Ahmed Abod. A second son was kidnapped. Abod said the father, Muhsin Akmosh Al-Timimi, had been working with foreign companies operating in Iraq.
In another drive-by shooting this morning, two policemen were killed and one wounded when their patrol was attacked in north-east Baghdad, said police Col. Ahmed al-Alawi.
A civilian working for a private company, Ali Salim, also was shot and killed while waiting outside his home in western Baghdad for a taxi to take him to work, said Dr. Muhanned Jawad in Yarmuk hospital, where the victim was taken after the drive-by shooting.
