British Forces Surrounded a Police Station in the Center of Basra

BAGHDAD (AFP) 1 hour ago - Iraqi police have detained two British soldiers in the southern port city of Basra, following a shooting incident.

One Basra policeman said the two men who were detained were undercover soldiers, wearing Arab costume, and carrying explosives, allegedly fired at a police patrol before being forced to stop.

"We can confirm that the Iraqi authorities are holding two UK service personnel and we are liaising with the Iraqi authorities on this matter," a British military spokesman told AFP by telephone from Basra.

British forces on Monday surrounded a police station in the centre of Basra after Iraqi police refused to release the two men, an AFP photographer at the scene said Monday.

A British citizen detained by
Iraqi police sits in a police
lockup in the southern port
city of Basra. REUTERS/Atef Hassan

● Iraqi working for NYT found shot dead in Basra

World War II fatally undermined Britain's already weakened commercial and financial leadership and heightened the importance of the Dominions and the United States as a source of military assistance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire#Post_World_War_II_Extent

Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor
Wednesday September 21, 2005
The Guardian

For some at Westminster, the dramatic events in Basra on Monday were a sure sign that Iraq is sliding towards civil war. For other, more sanguine voices, it was no worse than a busy night in Belfast.

According to Mohammad al-Waili, the governor of Basra province, the British army mounted a "barbaric, savage and irresponsible" raid on a police station. On the contrary, said Brigadier John Lorimer, commander of British troops in the region, Iraqi police had flouted the law in an "unacceptable" fashion, and two captured soldiers needed to be rescued.

 What was clear last night was that the trust between the British army and Iraqi police - whom the British helped to train - has largely broken down. Many of the 7,000 Iraqi police in Basra are now said to owe allegiance not to the state, but to the mosque. According to some estimates, at least half will take orders from Moqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shia cleric.

Earlier this year, Steven Vincent, a journalist working for the New York Times, reported that British authorities were reluctant to interfere in the militias' growing influence on the police. Shortly after his report was published, Mr Vincent was abducted by militiamen and shot dead.

On Sunday, the softly softly British approach appeared to come to an abrupt end when troops detained three leaders of the Mahdi army, the militia loyal to Mr Sadr. Among those held for questioning about bomb attacks was its local leader, Sheikh Ahmad Majid al-Fartusi. The arrests sparked demonstrations by around 200 supporters who blocked city centre streets, brandishing rifles.

During the next 36 hours, events moved quickly. First, on Monday afternoon, two undercover British soldiers, members of a special forces unit, were ordered to stop at an Iraqi police roadblock on the outskirts of the city. According to local reports, the men were driving fast in a civilian car. Each was wearing civilian clothes and Arabic headdress and, on being challenged, one opened fire on the officers, killing one and wounding a second.

John Reid, the defence secretary, said yesterday that the soldiers had been "doing their job"."They were building up a picture and [getting] information to protect our soldiers and their operations."

The pair were overwhelmed and taken initially to Jamiat police station in the city centre, where Arab journalists were allowed to take their photographs. Meanwhile, a crowd of men and youths gathered outside the police station, and began hurling rocks and petrol bombs at four British Warriors outside the building.

According to Iraqi reports, three demonstrators were killed and 15 injured. Television viewers around the world saw the moment that the gunner in one Warrior had to leap for his life as he and vehicle became engulfed by flames. Two others, members of the Coldstream Guards battle group, were also hurt. None of the injuries is thought to be life threatening.

At around this time, in the south-west of the city, a second New York Times journalist was being murdered. Fakher Haidar al-Tamimi, 38, who had also worked for the Guardian, had written an article for the Times in which he criticised the British authorities' laissez-faire attitude. According to neighbours, one of the vehicles driven by the men who abducted him from his home was a police car.

On Monday afternoon the Ministry of Defence said British forces were negotiating for the release of the two soldiers. Under Iraqi law, the pair should have been handed over to the coalition forces. At one point, the Iraqi interior minister, Bayan Jabr, is understood to have demanded their release, but the police refused.

In the early hours of yesterday morning, the "negotiations" resulted in a Warrior punching a large hole in the police station's perimeter wall and demolishing a couple of prefabricated buildings inside. An MoD spokesman suggested that this "might" have been an accident. "We would never orchestrate or authorise a jail break," he insisted. During the melee, several dozen prisoners are reported to have escaped, although the MoD denies this.

Brigadier Lorimer said he had taken "the difficult decision to order entry" into the police station after his men discovered their captured comrades were no longer inside. The police admitted they had handed the two men to the Mahdi army.

One Iraqi member of parliament said yesterday that the Mahdi army had been hoping to keep the two men as hostages who could be exchanged for their arrested leaders. A helicopter is thought to have seen a car being driven from the police station, however, and the two soldiers were later rescued from a nearby house.

Yesterday police complained the British had behaved like "terrorists". "A tank cannon struck a room where a policeman was praying," said one officer, Abbas Hassan. "This is terrorism. All we had was rifles."

Brigadier Lorimer preferred to describe it as "a difficult day". He added: "We have put this behind us and will move on".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,11816,1574811,00.html

  «« click on pic to Al Jazeera FP
British forces using tanks have broken down the walls of the central jail in the southern city of Basra to free two Britons.    

British forces using tanks have broken down the walls of the central jail in the southern city of Basra to free two Britons.

The captives were allegedly undercover commandos, who had been arrested on charges of shooting two Iraqi policemen.

Witnesses said about 150 Iraqi prisoners fled the jail as well.

Iraqi police detained the two British soldiers in the Basra jail following a shooting incident, a British military spokesman and police sources said.

Britain, however, denied reports late on Monday that its troops had stormed the prison to free two soldiers, saying the pair were released after negotiations.

UK denial

"We've heard nothing to suggest we stormed the prison," a Defence Ministry spokesman in London said. "We understand there were negotiations."  The spokesman said he had no more details of the soldiers' release.

BASRA Sept. 18, 2005 -- An Iraqi member of parliament has been killed and another wounded in a road ambush near Baghdad, the Interior Ministry says.

Faris Naser Husain was killed and his colleague Haydar Kasim Shinshu was wounded as the two MPs with the Kurdish list in parliament were heading towards Baghdad.

A driver and bodyguard were also killed in the attack, near Mushahada, 30km north of the capital, an Interior Ministry official said on Sunday.

US soldier killed

An US soldier was killed by a bomb explosion on Saturday, near al-Asad in western Iraq, the US military announced. His death brings to at least 1899 the number of American military personnel killed in Iraq since the US-led invasion of March 2003, according to Pentagon figures.

Basra protests

In a separate development, angry Shia militiamen took to the streets of the southern Iraqi city of Basra on Sunday, after British soldiers and police arrested their local leader, Iraqi army and Shia officials said.

Dozens of militiamen from Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's outlawed Jaish al-Mahdi (al-Mahdi Army) gathered around the local al-Sadr office.

Iraqi army officials said British soldiers and riot police on Saturday raided the home of local al-Mahdi Army leader Shaikh Ahmad al-Fartusi, arresting him, his brother and an unidentified third man.

There was no immediate comment from British forces in the area, although a spokesman confirmed that "an operation took place earlier".  

Already some of the Iraqi facts, coming from the Interior Minister in Baghdad, discounts just about everything UK MoD has released to the press as their version of events, you so often see as fact.

BBC World Radio reporter Richard Galpin in Baghdad, after interview of Iraqi Minister of Interior within last hour ::

• 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.

Iraqi police and civilians demonstrate against a British raid which freed two undercover soldiers in the southern city of Basra. Iraq's Prime Minister was to meet Britain's defence secretary in London with both countries working to quell tension.

The sign on right reads 'We are the police of Iraq, we are here for Iraq, and do not accept HYPOCRISY'  and the sign on the left reads 'no to occupiers - no to America'.  
REUTERS/Atef Hassan

.
British Press Ponders Fate of Troops in Iraq

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appeared to blame Iran for the incident when he called on its Shia-led government not to overplay its hand in southern Iraq. The Iranians "are interested, they are involved and they are active. And it's not helpful".

Iran insisted it had no hand in the fresh violence in southern Iraq and dismissed as "baseless and fictitious" Rumsfeld's allegations.

"The news published recently is baseless and fictitious, and it is circulating to cover up occupying forces' inability to provide security in Iraq," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told state news agency IRNA.

Sept. 19 -- Fascinating. No really, the `evolution' of state disinformation has probably never been better displayed than in the case of the two (more than likely) SAS soldiers who were `liberated' after being arrested by the Iraqi police on 19 September by a phalanx of tanks and helicopter gunships that stormed the police station where the two undercover soldiers were being held after they allegedly failed to stop at an Iraqi police roadblock and subsequently opened fire on the Iraqi police, killing one and wounding another.

The car they were travelling in was loaded with weapons including allegedly, assault rifles, a light machine gun, an anti-tank weapon, radio gear and a medical kit ('standard' SAS issue according to the BBC). According to at least two reports, the car they were traveling in (A Toyota Cressida) was "booby-trapped"

Subsequent accounts vary according to the source but according to the initial story broadcast on the BBC (19/9/05), the two men wore traditional Arab dress but then this changed to "civilian dress" (BBC TV News).

[...]
By now, in a classic disinformation campaign, so many stories were being circulated that sorting out the truth from fiction was virtually impossible unless one is prepared to dig and dig deep.

What is clear is that the two SAS "undercover operatives" had been caught red-handed by the British government's alleged allies, the Iraqi police, dressed as Arabs, replete with wigs and armed to the teeth and in a car which according to one report, was packed with explosives (the car by the way, has been taken away by the British occupation forces).

  «« click on pic for more photos
Iraqi policemen search a car at a checkpoint in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Local authorities in southern Iraq said they were halting cooperation with British forces, whose soldiers stormed a Basra jail to release two of their men, until the pair was handed back to face Iraqi justice.  AFP/Essam Al-Sudani

[...]
So now, the two undercover SAS men were, it is imputed, searching for `insurgents' as part of a counter-insurgency operation, which if true, what were they doing dressed as Iraqis?
Were they on some kind of provocative operation? According to one report, this is exactly what they were up to. Fattah al-Shaykh, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly told this account to al-Jazeera

If you really want to look for truth, then we should resort to the Iraqi justice away from the British provocations against the sons of Basra, particularly what happened today when the sons of Basra caught two non-Iraqis, who seem to be Britons and were in a car of the Cressida type. It was a booby-trapped car laden with ammunition and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market. However, the sons of the city of Basra arrested them. They [the two non-Iraqis] then fired at the people there and killed some of them. The two arrested persons are now at the Intelligence Department in Basra, and they were held by the National Guard force, but the British occupation forces are still surrounding this department in an attempt to absolve them of the crime.

[Al-Munajjid] In fact, Nidal, this incident gave answers to questions and suspicions that were lacking evidence about the participation of the occupation in some armed operations in Iraq. Many analysts and observers here had suspicions that the occupation was involved in some armed operations against civilians and places of worship and in the killing of scientists. But those were only suspicions that lacked proof. The proof came today through the arrest of the two British soldiers while they were planting explosives in one of the Basra streets. This proves, according to observers, that the occupation is not far from many operations that seek to sow sedition and maintain disorder, as this would give the occupation the justification to stay in Iraq for a longer period.