It seems so very long ago. On April 6 2003, the day the city of Basra was finally occupied by British troops, there was a febrile, uncertain sense of excitement.
As the paratroop column in two edgy files began to enter the city from the grounds of a university campus still littered with bodies, where the last battle with the Saddam Fedayeen had taken place, a handful of cautious bystanders emerged from their houses to applaud.
Within an hour that handful had turned into crowds on the road that ran along the city’s main canal with its little bridges. At one moment, a large pot of chai — the sweet, black Arab tea — was brought, and with it a tray of glasses that was passed among the bemused soldiers, uncertain whether they should be on their guard or finally relaxing.
On Monday, the British soldiers followed the same route, as they retreated from Basra Palace in the city centre to relocate to the air base outside the city — several kilometres and a whole culture away. As they left, Gordon Brown denied it was a retreat. But for many it was a defeat all the same. Among them the residents of Basra who tired quickly of the British presence.
”We are pleased that the Iraqi army is now taking over the situation. We as an Iraqi people reject occupation. We reject colonialism. We want our freedom,” one resident, Rudha Muter, told The Associated Press.
As the Iraqi flag was hoisted over Basra Palace, the city that the British left was largely under militia control. In reality the city that was Basra in 2003 was long dead before Monday’s withdrawal, and the fragile possibilities that it promised on that morning when Saddam’s rule collapsed were long ago snuffed out.
It has been suffocated by the rise of militias that took over the police, the politics and all aspects of Basra life. Even two years ago unembedded reporters would be happy to travel to Basra to escape the violence elsewhere, to a place where it was still possible to travel independently.
But now Basra has become like any other city in Iraq. It is a dark and violent place that has become a symbol for the other, barely-spoken-about conflict in Iraq. It has been largely ignored among the reporting of the other more obvious violence: al-Qaeda’s suicide spectaculars in Baghdad and the north, the sectarian killings and the relentless attacks directed at American troops.
Instead there has been the use of violence to secure political control of the south by the rival Shia factions — most prominent among them the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, backed financially by one Iranian faction, the Mehdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, which has largely taken control of Basra’s police. At one stage, more than 100 different political groups, a considerable number connected to armed fighters, populated Basra’s political scene.
In 2004 the first signs of what would become inevitable became apparent.
On the hospital and university campuses these same armed groups were moving in, attempting to take over hospital wards and departments, and, when they succeeded, imposing their own religious and political views. In doing so they imposed a curiously Iraqi version of Iran’s revolution back in the 1970s — religiously conservative but also violently anarchic.
What began with threatening posters warning women of what classes and clothes were appropriate for their status has taken over the campuses. Professional women would describe how their lives had become ever grimmer. Those who had never worn a headscarf were now going veiled in the street, women students were being bullied and intimidated. All this in a city that was considered a relatively cosmopolitan outpost in Saddam’s Iraq.
Other outspoken members of civil society — local journalists and judges, the heads of local NGOs — learned to shut up or risk the bullet. Where there was resistance to the creeping influence of the militia, hospital directors, administrators and staff were killed.
Although the British viewed what was happening as a messy little sideshow, something that would disappear as their attempts to impose democracy continued, it was the real and enduring story of Basra that only became more entrenched as the years went on.
With Shia resistance to the occupation gaining pace across Iraq, the political parties and their armed enforcers, starting in Kerbala and Najaf, engaged in a Shia political turf war which gradually transformed the city’s politics. As the parties fought, and fractured, the fight for Basra and the south came to resemble a gangland war.
And in that war British soldiers were caught in a crossfire where killing British troops was the quickest way for a faction to establish its militant credentials as anti-occupation and therefore deserving of political respect and authority. Soldiers based within Basra Palace, or employees of NGOs based nearby, would describe the constant barrage of mortars and rockets into the British positions.
What was at stake was not simply power, but cash. And not only cash derived from control of businesses by the militias, including petrol stations, car imports and protection rackets. Also at stake was access to the suitcases of money being brought in across the Shatt al-Arab waterway from Iran to support the groups that had found sanctuary there in Saddam’s time.
In the end it does not really matter what the British army and government say. Whether they say it was a victory or a defeat. What matters is how the militias perceive it. After this week they will say that they chased the British out of Basra. — Â