Already some of the Iraqi facts, coming from the Interior Minister Baqir Solagh Jabr in Baghdad, discounts just about everything UK MoD has released to the press as their version of events.

BBC World Radio reporter Richard Galpin in Baghdad, after interview of Iraqi Interior Minister earlier today ::

• SAS soldiers were in Arab clothing observing the Basra protest demonstrations.
  
• Basra police noticed their light skin and feared foreign terrorrists from Lebanon, Jordan or Syria.
  
• Upon investigation, a firefight ensued where the SAS men killed one policeman and injured four others.
  
• Brits were taken prisoner and held at the police station and were not handed over to militants.
  
• British commando's bulldozed their way into the police station and used explosives blowing out the doors to force entry.
  
• SAS men were found within the compound, where they were held by police and not under control of Al Sadr militants.

In London, the pictures of the violence made the war seem very real. Video of the burning soldier in Basra was shown repeatedly yesterday on the BBC and other news stations but the photographs in newspapers seemed more haunting, showing a man frozen in flames.

BASRA (AFP) Sept. 22 -- Local authorities in Iraq's southern city of Basra have said they will refuse to engage with British troops following a British raid on a police station this week.

"All regular meetings between the governorate and British troops have been cancelled and we will not allow British soldiers into the governorate building or any other public office in Basra," according to Nadim al-Jaabari, spokesman for the provincial governor.

The head of the 41-member provincial council, Mohammed Saadun al-Abidi, confirmed the decision to refuse all contacts with British forces which are responsible for security in the region.

"Yesterday, the provincial council voted in session to boycott British troops and we are demanding that they return the two British soldiers to Iraqi custody," Abidi said.

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A British soldier and an Iraqi policeman in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Local authorities in Basra have said they will refuse to engage with British troops following a British raid on a police station this week.   AFP/Essam Al-Sudani

"We are aware of reports of a boycott, but we are waiting until we can establish that is the case and come up with a plan," British army spokesman Major Steve Melbourne told AFP.

Supporters of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr hold his pictures and cheer during a speech at Friday prayers in the southern Iraqi city of Basra today. Imam Asaad al-Nasiri, a representative of Sadr from Najaf, told the crowd that British troops should release Iraqi militia members detained last week and return two British soldiers to the Iraqi police.   REUTERS/Atef Hassan

BAGHDAD, Iraq - British troops in the tense southern city of Basra greatly reduced their presence in the streets, apparently responding to a provincial governor's call to sever cooperation until London apologized for storming a police station to free two of its soldiers.

For the second day, no British forces were seen accompanying Iraqi police on patrols of Basra, as they routinely had in the past.

Elsewhere in Iraq

Near the northern city of Kirkuk, a bomb damaged an oil pipeline, sending plumes of black smoke and fire up into the air, officials said.

Unidentified men in a speeding car wielding machine guns killed local police commander Col. Fadil Mahmoud Mohammed and his driver Thursday morning near Baquba, north of Baghdad, police said.

Six people were killed in the capital, including a man and two of his sons whose home in the New Baghdad area was raided by about 25 gunmen dressed in police uniforms and black masks, said police Col. Ahmed Abod. A second son was kidnapped. Abod said the father, Muhsin Akmosh Al-Timimi, had been working with foreign companies operating in Iraq.

Two policemen patrolling northeast Baghdad were killed in a separate drive-by shooting, police Col. Ahmed al-Alawi said.

April 2004 -- Compounding impending disaster Iraq's 'Viceroy' Paul Bremer, isolated in his Palace, closed the newspaper of Shia cleric Moqtada Al Sadr, mistakenly dismissing him as a firebrand with little following. It is unlikely that if he had little following, the vast teeming Shia are of Baghdad's Saddam City would have unanimously been renamed Sadr City, to honour his family of whose esteem, he is to many now the mantle holder. The paper - Al Hawza - had just ten thousand print run in twenty five million population, hardly likely to cause great problems. But its censorship did. Saddam methods: Bremer has long been a new Saddam to Iraqis.

Now Najav and Kerbala are surrounded by US troops avowed to capture Sadr: 'dead or alive' - back in Wild West mode in the 'Cradle of Civilisation'. Either options, or violation of these revered, sacred cities and shrines will make Viet Nam a tea party. Further, hordes of Saudis and Iranians and others, for whom the cities are equally sacrosanct will flood in to fight the invaders, over Iraq's now unsecured borders. Blood bath comes to mind.

U.S.Forces tore down posters in public
of Muqtada Al Sadr and made arrests of
citizens displaying his poster in their home.    

The firebrand cleric's violent challenge can't be tolerated by the U.S. But a fight to the finish could imperil Washington's exit strategy.

Apr. 05, 2004 -- As if Fallujah wasn't bad enough, the U.S. military in Iraq suddenly finds itself fighting on a second, far more dangerous front. Even as hundreds of Marines prepared to enter the restive Sunni triangle town where four U.S. security men were killed last week, a Shiite uprising over the weekend saw Coalition troops under fire in Baghdad, Najaf, Kufa, Nasiriyah, Amara and Basra.

Eight Americans and one allied soldier were killed in the fighting and 36 were wounded; the death toll among Iraqis was almost 50, with hundreds wounded. Fighting raged on in Baghdad as U.S. troops clashed with militiamen loyal to the firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

The new uprising would not be tolerated and would be suppressed, warned U.S. viceroy J. Paul Bremer on Monday. Hours later, the Coalition announced an arrest warrant had been issued for Sadr. But the cleric had already told his supporters that the time for peaceful protest had passed, urging them to "terrorize" the Americans and their allies.

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An Iraqi man is interrogated after posters of Muqtada al-Sadr were found in his car at a traffic checkpoint on the outskirts of Najaf, Iraq.   Friday April 16, 2004