After four and half years, British troops officially handed over responsibility for Basra to the Iraqi government on Sunday. There wasn’t much fanfare: a handful of government officials, including National Security Adviser Mowaffaq Rubaie and Basra Governor Mohammed Waeli were on hand. British foreign secretary David Miliband flew out for the occasion, and Maj. Gen. Graham Binns, the commander who marched troops into Basra in spring 2003 (a coincidence he said was “especially poignant”), presided over the official handover. “Basra security forces have demonstrated that they are capable,” Binns said. He explained that the Brits are now “guests in your country and will act accordingly.”
But the Brits aren’t quite packing their bags yet. The 4,500 British troops currently in the province will stay on to give the Iraqi security forces backup through next spring, when they will drop down to 2,500. On paper, it doesn’t appear that the British soldiers will be seeing more combat. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki would have to sign off if they were to provide backup for Iraqi forces in battle. In reality, though, it probably won’t be long before the Coalition troops are called up to fight: the rivalries between various Shiite groups have spilled over into bloody street fights several times this year. The violence in Basra has dropped noticeably in recent months, but the city is hardly secure. The official handover ceremony today was held at the Basra airport, which is miles away from the city center. A public ceremony in the city would have been a tempting target for the rocket men and mortar teams that pounded British bases during the summer. Rubaie acknowledged the unstable situation after the ceremony. “We have huge challenges ahead of us,” he said. “We have yet to declare victory and [say] this is the end of the fight. We are a long way from that.”
There are at least a dozen militias in Basra, but the group that some Iraqi officials point to as the spoilers are the supporters of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. It’s widely believed that Sadr’s Mahdi Army controls the police in the city. It’s not hard to understand why these rivalries have turned into such a bloody struggle. Not far away from the Basra airport, gas flares from massive oil fields burn night and day. The oil fields around Basra provide a huge share, nearly 90 percent by some estimates, of the government’s income. But there are more arcane matters that the Shiite groups fight about. The Sadrists and a splinter faction called Fadhila see themselves as an indigenous Iraqi Arab movement. They ridicule the dominant Shiite party, the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq, as Iranian stooges because many of the group’s top members, who are now senior officials in the Iraqi government, spent years in exile in Iran.
A Sadr rep who attended today’s ceremony said their group has good relations with the government. On the sidelines of the ceremony, another Sadr supporter was much more outspoken. “All the parties in the government came from outside except Fadhila and the Sadr group,” says Mohammed Zaidawi, a prominent southern tribal sheik. “All the sectarian operations that are happening—the killing, the kidnapping—is because of Iran.” (Gen. Ray Odierno, the second in command of U.S. troops in Iraq, also sounded a warning at a gathering of journalists in Baghdad yesterday afternoon. “What we have to watch is undue Iranian influence,” he said.) Zaidawi was sporting a large black robe with gold trim, and as he worked himself up, a group of fellow sheiks gathered around to hear him speak. “You think these words today mean we’re done?” he asked, referring to the official speeches. He shrugged his broad shoulders. “The situation is getting worse.”
All eyes will certainly be on Basra in the coming months to see whether the Iraqis can hold the country’s second-largest city together. It’s not only a test case for the Iraqi security forces; it will also be a good test of whether Shiite politicians can get along. If Iraqi leaders can’t keep the peace in a largely homogenous city like Basra, where well over half the population is Shiite, there’s little hope they can hold things together farther north.
