Mick Hartley

Considering the publicity given to tales of the Mahdi army taking over in Basra after the British troops left, this is worth noting:

The Shia militias, the Jaish al- Mahdi, who controlled large parts of Basra until March this year, has now gone and instead the city is firmly under the grip of Iraq’s new security forces, in whom the coalition has invested so much training. They re-established control in April, in an operation romantically named “The Charge of the Knights”, systematically clearing the city with British and American support, confiscating illegal weapons and arresting the violent gangs whose combination of criminality and vicious extremism was making life a misery for so many of Basra’s people.

Around the city the posters of religious leaders are being replaced with billboards advertising cars and mobile phones and photographs of Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, who is rightly credited with being the driving force behind the army’s crackdown. You see the symbol of The Charge of the Knights everywhere, a black horse carrying the flag of Iraq trampling the gangsters underfoot.

This improvement in security has made Basrawis more confident of their future than at any time since 2003. A recent poll showed that only 8 per cent now regard security as their main concern; 80 per cent have confidence in the Iraqi security forces to protect them. Women are free to walk the streets uncovered and to wear Western dress should they so choose. 

Yet what also makes people here so confident is that they know that they live in what is potentially one of the richest cities in the Middle East. They have both oil and natural gas. The “flare-off” I see from my window alone represents enough gas to heat a sizeable town. Then they have Iraq’s major southern airport, in which we have invested heavily with them so that it is increasingly used by commercial airlines; you can now fly to Basra from London, changing in Amman. They also have Iraq’s only ports. Last week they unloaded 24,000 tonnes at Umm Qasr port and every berth was full, double the traffic of just a month ago.

Most importantly, they have the people determined to realise this potential and, as one Basrawi businessman put it to me this week, to be a “Dubai, not a Mogadishu”. What they want and need now are international partners.

The author is Barney White-Spunner, commander  of British Forces in Iraq (is there some reason why people with strange names go into the army? – a kind of Boy-named-Sue effect?), so it’s hardly an impartial view. Encouraging, though….