It’s mid-afternoon in the busy Asha’ar market in central Basra and the first heat of an Iraqi summer is already setting in. Eight soldiers from A Company, the 1st Battalion, the Royal Regiment of Wales, are breaking the back of another six-hour foot patrol.
”Only four and a half hours to go, boys,” says Colour Sergeant Craig Stockdale-Smith. They barely break a smile.
The soldiers, young men from south Wales with nicknames including Mogs, Dai Drink, and Killer, have just collected four amiable if uninterested Iraqi policemen who patrol with the British troops as part of their training.
A few minutes into the sprawling market and they come across three stalls illegally selling Iraqi police identification badges and armbands.
Craig (”Colour”, the men call him) tells the others to confiscate the lot, despite the increasingly angry protests of the shopkeepers, who insist they ”only sell to policemen who show us their ID”.
”Why not give me one more chance?” pleads one. ”This cost me a lot of money.”
The British military, which controls a large area of southern Iraq, is trying to train the newly formed police and other security forces.
But they are worried that if badges like this are on sale anyone can disguise themselves as a police officer. Already there are security problems in this port city caused by unlicensed armed groups linked to hardline Shia religious parties.
And, at the same time, the troops have had frustrations finding enough equipment for the new police force. One of the policemen on patrol with the A Company unit today carries no other insignia than a plain blue shirt and a small identification badge hanging round his neck.
Some of the soldiers want to confiscate the plain blue shirts and black gun holsters that are also on sale.
Balance
Craig (29) a platoon commander responsible for around 25 men, stops them: ”We have to have a balance between wiping out his livelihood and taking stuff associated with the security forces.”
The patrol moves on and spends the rest of a sweltering afternoon manning a checkpoint to search cars for illegal weapons. The hours are long and the work is rarely glamorous.
Like each man on the patrol, Craig carries at least 15kg of equipment on his back: several litres of water, three different radios, plastic handcuffs, spare ammunition, a global positioning system that he bought himself, spare batteries, field dressings, a rifle cleaning kit, rifle oil, laminated street maps, a helmet (they wear berets on patrol) and a visor. All wear body armour and carry their SA-80 assault rifles cradled in their arms. Some also carry wooden hickory sticks for crowd control and separate guns to fire baton rounds. One unfortunate in the team must carry the heavy radio backpack, too.
The previous night Craig and his team spent six hours on duty with the Quick Reaction Force, which is called upon as a back-up force for serious incidents. After the foot patrol, he will have six hours off to catch a few hours of sleep. Then at midnight they are on duty again, this time a double shift: a six-hour foot patrol followed by six hours with the Quick Reaction Force, though luck is on their side and it is quiet enough for them to sleep through the morning. Then six hours off and back on patrol.
In the Quick Reaction Force lounge at the base in central Basra, the large port city of southern Iraq, are half a dozen bunkbeds, a few armchairs around the television and DVD player, and a bookshelf lined with thrillers and boxes of board games: Risk, Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly. Like the others, Craig is allowed just 20 minutes of phone calls home a week, the only chance he gets to talk to his wife Hayley, and time on the internet. Letters can take up to eight days to reach Basra from home. The tedium of the work remains a serious problem.
”It can be one of the most mundane, boring jobs in the world and at other times it can be the most exhilarating,” he says.
His regiment desperately wanted to join the war in Iraq last year, but were not among the units chosen. Instead, for several weeks before the war, Craig’s company were manning a fire station in Walsall in the West Midlands during the firefighters’ strike, tackling car and house fires and a huge blaze at a factory.
They jealously watched snippets of the war on television from Canada where they were on a training exercise. ”It was very frustrating. All the boys wanted to do was be involved in intense war-fighting.” Only in November did they deploy in Basra.
”When I first got here, I had seen the news and I expected some animosity and some negative vibes from the people but it was far from it,” he says. ”They really seemed happy to see us.” But he admits that at first he had concerns about why Britain joined the US in its war in Iraq.
”I wouldn’t say I was sceptical about why we went to war but as anyone else I would be silly if I didn’t have questions on my mind,” he says. ”But when I got over here my doubts were eradicated. You could see how these people were oppressed.”
There is little talk of the apparent danger of the job. The soldiers seem unperturbed when the news comes on the television talking of another rocket attack on the main American headquarters in Baghdad, 480km further north. The British have been lucky so far to escape the violence that the much larger force of US troops has come up against.
Fewer than 60 British troops have died since the war, while nearly 600 Americans have been killed. A soldier from Craig’s regiment was killed in a road accident in November, but none has died in combat.
”We know we get a much better deal than the Americans do,” he says. Patrolling through the heart of the city on foot and without helmets would be unthinkable for US troops in Baghdad.
The Shia Muslims of southern Iraq, who were persecuted under Saddam Hussein’s regime, have most to gain in postwar Iraq and have largely welcomed the British. Already services such as electricity are much improved compared with before the war, and are vastly better than in Baghdad. Better security has meant more progress on reconstruction.
Yet huge problems remain, not least smuggling, the growing influence of armed tribal and religious groups and, at the root of everything, massive unemployment. The British military talk of earning the ”consent” of the Iraqis, but they admit it is fragile.
”At the moment they are very much pro us, pointing out where [improvised-explosive devices, or roadside bombs] are buried,” says Craig. ”If we ever lose that consent the situation could turn dramatically.”
He hasn’t yet had to fire his rifle but the soldiers have the sense the violence is much closer at hand than on other deployments, even in the Balkans. ”It’s a bit more lively,” says one. In private, they admit their families are scared stiff.
Perhaps the toughest moment came in January when some 2 000 Iraqis gathered in Basra for a protest over unpaid pensions. Iraqi policemen quickly started firing over the crowd and as the protest threatened to turn into a riot, the British were called for back-up.
The crowd stoned the soldiers, wounding one in the leg, but Craig and a handful of men armed with shields and firing only baton rounds pushed the crowd back and calmed the situation. Later, some in the crowd even returned the fired baton rounds. ”They would give them back and say, ‘Mister, Mister, this hurt.’ I bet it did,” says Craig.
On June 30, the US and British administration will hand over the reins of government to Iraqis and although the military will stay, much more responsibility will fall on the shoulders of the new Iraqi security forces.
Like the police who failed to control the protest and the unenthusiastic officers on patrol in al-Asha’ar, it is obvious that few are ready for the task.
Craig’s regiment is due to leave at the end of April but has already been told it will return in a year’s time to maintain a British presence in Iraq.
”We expect western standards of the police but we can’t expect to leave here next month with an Iraqi police at the same level as we have in Europe,” he says.
”Slowly but surely they will get better. I keep telling the others, we will continue to come back here and come back here unless we get these people developed and doing their job.”
Born in Cardiff, Craig joined up at 16. For him and most in the company, the army was a chance to escape the dole queues of south Wales and, as the recruiters promise, to see the world. Craig’s grandfather had served in the same regiment. ”He told me not to join, but it was something I wanted to do from a young age,” he says.
Craig has earned five medals and trained or served in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, the Falkland Islands, Belize, Brunei, the US, Canada and, for the past five months, Iraq.
”I suppose amongst my peer group back at home I’m not doing too badly.” – Guardian Unlimited Â