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 first targets in the coalition’s campaign nine months ago to get rid of Saddam. But the missile failed to sink Al-Mansour (The Victory) — which now lies half across the Shatt al-Arab waterway, together with the rusting hulks of Iraqi gunboats sunk in the war with Iran.
It is a sign of how far southern Iraq has come that while Tony Blair was addressing the troops on Sunday Iraqi tourists were taking a pleasure cruise past Saddam’s ruined yacht.
”I left Iraq 22 years ago because of Saddam,” said Mohammad Ali, a chemistry teacher on a cruise with his Iranian wife and family. ”I’m so happy to be back. The British did us a favour. They got rid of the biggest dictator in the Middle East.”
In contrast to the daily mayhem in the rest of Iraq, the British-occupied south of the country is — comparatively — a tranquil place. Locals hope it could eventually regain its reputation as Iraq’s riviera.
There is violence here, of course: kidnappings and carjackings by the armed bandits who lurk on the road north of Basra are common. Over the weekend unidentified assassins shot dead a local lawyer; three days before Christmas gunmen killed a Christian alcohol seller as he went to buy vegetables in the 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, with their HQ in one of Saddam’s riverside palaces.
The last British soldier killed in action in Iraq died in late August. ”It’s all about managing the Shia mood,” the troops’ commander, Brigadier David Rutherford-Jones, said before the prime minister’s arrival. ”Their expectations are very high. I sense that they are outpacing reality a little.” He added: ”These are big issues.”
So far Basra’s Shia religious parties 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, spokesperson for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), said he had a ”good relationship” with coalition forces.
He was grateful they had got rid of Saddam, but the British 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,” Basri complained.
Other Basra residents expressed disgruntlement at the British military’s failure to build a bridge over the river and its new tough policy on oil smuggling.
”The British captured my tanker. It was loaded with diesel for my boat. They thought I was a smuggler,” said Hamid Hussein, a 29-year-old boatman offering harbour cruises from Basra’s shabby corniche.
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 divided into three chunks — the tranquil south occupied by a British-led multinational force which includes Italian and Dutch troops; Kurdistan; and Baghdad and the Sunni triangle.
There, Saddam Hussein’s capture just over three weeks ago does not appear to have discouraged the insurgents, as some observers optimistically suggested, but merely to have galvanised them.
On New Year’s Eve a suicide car bomber blew up a crowded restaurant in central Baghdad, killing eight people and injuring 30, including three journalists. The previous week guerrillas fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the Sheraton Hotel; lobbed mortars at the Green Zone, the coalition’s vast Baghdad HQ; hit the Turkish, Iranian and German embassies; and killed four US soldiers in Bequba, north of Baghdad, using their preferred weapon: the roadside bomb. They also launched a major attack in the southern city of Kerbala, using suicide car bombs, killing two Thai and five Bulgarian soldiers.
It is hardly surprising, then, that during this, his second trip to Iraq, the prime minister decided to stick to Basra.
”Down here is very different from up there,” Major Charles Mayo, the British military’s spokesperson pointed out, speaking at the army’s other main base in Basra’s international airport. ”We have the support of the local population.”
He added: ”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-found prosperity as of the emollient style of British troops, who patrol the rubbish-filled bazaars on foot.
Here, posters of martyred Shia clerics have replaced ones of Saddam. Since Saddam’s fall sales of satellite dishes and mobile phones — which use 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.
Basra’s electricity supply, meanwhile, is better than Baghdad’s, where pylons were looted or destroyed. The city’s population of 1,2-million has 290 megawatts of the 330 it needs. The water supply is poor but improving; work has begun on a new sewage system.
”Basra is economically more important than Baghdad,” said Hamid Alrobai, receptionist at the Sultan Palace Hotel, one of the many new businesses that have sprung up.
Given the chance, Basra would be beautiful again, Alrobai added. ”The problem is that Saddam stole many of the date palms and put them in his palaces. It’s going to take time.”
Keeping the peace
Founded by Caliph Omar in 637AD, Basra was occupied by the British from the end of World War I until 1930
2003
April 7 British tanks push into Basra. Three British soldiers killed
May 29 Tony Blair visits troops in Basra
June 23 British soldiers fire on demonstrators after soldier shoots dead protester
June 24 Six British military personnel killed, eight wounded in two incidents in southern Iraq near Amara
July 27 British reservist killed when patrol ambushed by angry crowd
August 14 British soldier killed, two wounded in Basra when bomb hits ambulance
August 23 British serviceman killed, one wounded in Basra when vehicles come under fire
August 28 British soldier killed, one wounded by armed Iraqis in Ali al-Sharqi, 190km north-west of Basra
November 11 Four Iraqis, including two policemen, die, nine people hurt, when bomb explodes in minibus in Basra
November 12 Truck bomb outside barracks in Nassiriya kills 19 Italians and 14 others
November 20 Assyrian politician working with coalition abducted and killed
2004
January 3 Local lawyer Zaki Mohammed Saleh al-Khatib shot dead south of Basra
January 4 Blair makes second trip to Iraq – Guardian Unlimited Â