British Troops Being Shot at More Now Than During the War - Basra Report
Ewa in Basra | 13.12.2003 13:17
Occupied Basra 13/12/03
General News Round-Up
British soldiers are coming under attack more now that they did during the war according to an anonymous soldier source based in Basra. Conversation at an undisclosed military location revealed that a British convoy came under fire yesterday on the highway to Basra Airport, home to British Forces Divisional HQ and corporate war profiteers Bechtel. The source said that a vehicle had been hit and soldiers returned fire but there were no injuries.
Probed further, he said, 'Our lads are coming under attack more now then they were during the war. We're getting shot at every day. There's much more danger now than during the war'. He went on to say that the situation was beginning to mirror that of the occupation in Northern Ireland where 'soldiers are going to start getting killed everyday and it'll barely make the papers'. He stressed that 'It seems like everyone's forgotten about us back home'. When questioned about heavy machine gun fire heard two days ago at approximately 4.30pm near Coalition Provisional Authority South HQ (based in the former Baath Republican Palace), he put it down to 'tribal warfare'. Asked to explain the situation with regards to this warfare he said, 'There's whole villages out there, thousands of people, with tribes fighting eachother. We don't want to get in the middle of that. Us going in there with eight of us? I don't think so'. This statement implied that troop levels were either too low to, or there was an unwillingness for, British Forces to carry out their obligations under the 1949 Geneva Conventions to provide for the safety of the civilian population. British Troops can be mustered up to contain and kill protestors as happened with a spontaneous demonstration involving former soldiers demanding survival-benefits in Maqal in September and also in Majal Al-Kabir in June, where four demonstrators were shot dead, protesting against British forces inflaming of religious-cultural taboos by humiliating women by entering their rooms without permission.
The heavy gun fire erupted in rapid continual bursts lasting 20-30 seconds two days ago. A corporate manager frequenting the Palace told me, 'The gunfire came from beside the Palace'. Beside the palace? Who would risk almost certain death blasting off a heavy-ammo machine gun outside the HQ of the British Occupation Administration? For what? Stress release? A frustration vent? Some kind of 'prolonged symbolic warning?' The fire must have been directed at the Palace itself.
Three days ago I met a woman by chance in the offices of a Kuwaiti subcontracting firm who began to tell my friend that soldiers had raided her house in Hor Zuber approximately three weeks ago. She said she had no sons, just three daughters, and that noone in her family had done anything wrong. 'They came in and messed up everything, they wrecked my television set – why did they do that? – and they terrified my daughters. My youngest is having nightmares now, she's totally afraid'. She also alleged that they had stolen 20,000 ID ($10), however my friend felt this was a lie, spun to capitalize on the incident. The alleged search occurred at 4am and the unit did not have a translator with them, a requirement under current occupation regulations. 'They didn’t bring one until much much after they had left', she said.
Former soldiers demanding survival-payment from the CPA have rioted outside CP South HQ twice in the past four days, hurling rocks and abuse at the tank-flanked gates. The ex-soldiers were given anti-rebellion payments of $120 twice in July and August, but since then have received a fraction if anything at all. Local people complain that some individuals claimed benefits three times in the names of different people, defrauding their desperate former colleagues.
The military arm of the state was the biggest employer in Iraq; weapon (chemical and ordinary artillery) production, tank and vehicle manufacturing, compulsory service, and wars – both that against the Kurds, Shia and Communists – and Iran and Kuwait, created a military occupation of Iraq's population long before the multinational forces invaded. Iraq was living on a war-footing, off a war economy, under attack, for nearly a generation during its lost wars on Iran and Kuwait. Saddam's internal empire forging, and all the blood letting, life cheapening, chemical incineration of entire villages, torture as a means of mass (policy) communication, population transferring, and home-demolishing it struck with it, has left its coerced Shia slaves, traumatized, impoverished and desperate for funds to feed their families.
Former Baathists of all ranks are being executed on an almost daily basis. The revenge-killings are thought to be the work of religious Shia parties whose members suffered the most under the dictatorship. Those still in power in local government are protected in their movements by Iraqi police and in position by the Occupation Adminsitration. One, a former intelligence officer, was pointed out to me by a former Baath party youth propaganda teacher, a position she said she carried out under duress, at a heavily-guarded cabinet dinner in the exorbitant Cassa Sultan Hotel.
Three weeks ago, the head of the Democratic Athurian Party in Basra was killed by unknown religious party members for supplying British troops with alcohol.
Incendiary devices are found in Basra on a daily basis (5-9 estimate). Locals and private security firm bodyguards say they're not serious and are simply moneymaking scams by local pranksters or gangsters eager to net the cash reward offered by the Brits for discovered bombs. Improvised Electronic Devices (IEDs) are cheap and easy to make, especially given the unexploded tank shells, mines and munitions still lying around all over the country, many of which are being scavenged and recycled by the resistance into an effective anti-Occupation arsenal. 'They are doing everything they can to stop this, but its very hard, its hard to prove who planted them', told me one private bodyguard. One large IED was found and diffused outside of the home of the boss of Iraqi-Kuwaiti manpower recruitment company Dehdari. The local rumour mill, based on reasonable logic, has it that he is a CIA agent, netting and vetting Iraqi workers for key KBR construction contracts and crucial service provisions for the Palace (CPA HQ).
Iraq's biggest oil company – The Southern Oil Company has been high security alert for the past week following the resistance victory over the oil fields in Kirkuk where production is negligible now following daily pipeline and infrastructure attack.
The old Baath 'Palace' itself is little more than a British Colonial-era-style mahogany paneled house set in basic green-lawned grounds (The emperor has no clothes!),. The asphalt inner-roads are navigated by golf-buggy cruising plumy press officers whose refusal to answer questions is a smile-carried charmed, 'I couldn't possibly tell you that'. Hefty concrete wall-slabs ring it. The grounds bear trailer offices and press rooms, carpeted and soft-lit, and a trailer cafeteria with a chalet-like interior, decorated with technicolour vivid pictures and posters of rolling desert and field landscapes. The staff are Pakistani and Philipino workers (for security reasons, to limit poisoning-possibilities), who serve up iced-tea, curries, tuna-pasta salads, fruit jellies, sponge-cakes and every all-American condiment you can think of. Contractors chow down with intelligence officers, and lone soldiers stir plates of tumeric-yellow oily spuds beside jabbering media spin-doctors and decree forgers. White marquees dot the approach to the 'palace', home to Nepalese Ghurka and Fijian troops, serving their British masters as security guards, patrolling the palace and manning the main back gate.
The offices of the BBC lie next to the palace, perfectly positioned to digest the freshly-fed news and regurgitate it to the British public, straight from the Chief's mouth, and into the inboxes of UK content and news controllers, monitoring with military precision what is allowed to be known, where the Occupation and any dying Iraqi civilians or soldiers, dropped off the news agenda along with the last shot-off limb.
General News Round-Up
British soldiers are coming under attack more now that they did during the war according to an anonymous soldier source based in Basra. Conversation at an undisclosed military location revealed that a British convoy came under fire yesterday on the highway to Basra Airport, home to British Forces Divisional HQ and corporate war profiteers Bechtel. The source said that a vehicle had been hit and soldiers returned fire but there were no injuries.
Probed further, he said, 'Our lads are coming under attack more now then they were during the war. We're getting shot at every day. There's much more danger now than during the war'. He went on to say that the situation was beginning to mirror that of the occupation in Northern Ireland where 'soldiers are going to start getting killed everyday and it'll barely make the papers'. He stressed that 'It seems like everyone's forgotten about us back home'. When questioned about heavy machine gun fire heard two days ago at approximately 4.30pm near Coalition Provisional Authority South HQ (based in the former Baath Republican Palace), he put it down to 'tribal warfare'. Asked to explain the situation with regards to this warfare he said, 'There's whole villages out there, thousands of people, with tribes fighting eachother. We don't want to get in the middle of that. Us going in there with eight of us? I don't think so'. This statement implied that troop levels were either too low to, or there was an unwillingness for, British Forces to carry out their obligations under the 1949 Geneva Conventions to provide for the safety of the civilian population. British Troops can be mustered up to contain and kill protestors as happened with a spontaneous demonstration involving former soldiers demanding survival-benefits in Maqal in September and also in Majal Al-Kabir in June, where four demonstrators were shot dead, protesting against British forces inflaming of religious-cultural taboos by humiliating women by entering their rooms without permission.
The heavy gun fire erupted in rapid continual bursts lasting 20-30 seconds two days ago. A corporate manager frequenting the Palace told me, 'The gunfire came from beside the Palace'. Beside the palace? Who would risk almost certain death blasting off a heavy-ammo machine gun outside the HQ of the British Occupation Administration? For what? Stress release? A frustration vent? Some kind of 'prolonged symbolic warning?' The fire must have been directed at the Palace itself.
Three days ago I met a woman by chance in the offices of a Kuwaiti subcontracting firm who began to tell my friend that soldiers had raided her house in Hor Zuber approximately three weeks ago. She said she had no sons, just three daughters, and that noone in her family had done anything wrong. 'They came in and messed up everything, they wrecked my television set – why did they do that? – and they terrified my daughters. My youngest is having nightmares now, she's totally afraid'. She also alleged that they had stolen 20,000 ID ($10), however my friend felt this was a lie, spun to capitalize on the incident. The alleged search occurred at 4am and the unit did not have a translator with them, a requirement under current occupation regulations. 'They didn’t bring one until much much after they had left', she said.
Former soldiers demanding survival-payment from the CPA have rioted outside CP South HQ twice in the past four days, hurling rocks and abuse at the tank-flanked gates. The ex-soldiers were given anti-rebellion payments of $120 twice in July and August, but since then have received a fraction if anything at all. Local people complain that some individuals claimed benefits three times in the names of different people, defrauding their desperate former colleagues.
The military arm of the state was the biggest employer in Iraq; weapon (chemical and ordinary artillery) production, tank and vehicle manufacturing, compulsory service, and wars – both that against the Kurds, Shia and Communists – and Iran and Kuwait, created a military occupation of Iraq's population long before the multinational forces invaded. Iraq was living on a war-footing, off a war economy, under attack, for nearly a generation during its lost wars on Iran and Kuwait. Saddam's internal empire forging, and all the blood letting, life cheapening, chemical incineration of entire villages, torture as a means of mass (policy) communication, population transferring, and home-demolishing it struck with it, has left its coerced Shia slaves, traumatized, impoverished and desperate for funds to feed their families.
Former Baathists of all ranks are being executed on an almost daily basis. The revenge-killings are thought to be the work of religious Shia parties whose members suffered the most under the dictatorship. Those still in power in local government are protected in their movements by Iraqi police and in position by the Occupation Adminsitration. One, a former intelligence officer, was pointed out to me by a former Baath party youth propaganda teacher, a position she said she carried out under duress, at a heavily-guarded cabinet dinner in the exorbitant Cassa Sultan Hotel.
Three weeks ago, the head of the Democratic Athurian Party in Basra was killed by unknown religious party members for supplying British troops with alcohol.
Incendiary devices are found in Basra on a daily basis (5-9 estimate). Locals and private security firm bodyguards say they're not serious and are simply moneymaking scams by local pranksters or gangsters eager to net the cash reward offered by the Brits for discovered bombs. Improvised Electronic Devices (IEDs) are cheap and easy to make, especially given the unexploded tank shells, mines and munitions still lying around all over the country, many of which are being scavenged and recycled by the resistance into an effective anti-Occupation arsenal. 'They are doing everything they can to stop this, but its very hard, its hard to prove who planted them', told me one private bodyguard. One large IED was found and diffused outside of the home of the boss of Iraqi-Kuwaiti manpower recruitment company Dehdari. The local rumour mill, based on reasonable logic, has it that he is a CIA agent, netting and vetting Iraqi workers for key KBR construction contracts and crucial service provisions for the Palace (CPA HQ).
Iraq's biggest oil company – The Southern Oil Company has been high security alert for the past week following the resistance victory over the oil fields in Kirkuk where production is negligible now following daily pipeline and infrastructure attack.
The old Baath 'Palace' itself is little more than a British Colonial-era-style mahogany paneled house set in basic green-lawned grounds (The emperor has no clothes!),. The asphalt inner-roads are navigated by golf-buggy cruising plumy press officers whose refusal to answer questions is a smile-carried charmed, 'I couldn't possibly tell you that'. Hefty concrete wall-slabs ring it. The grounds bear trailer offices and press rooms, carpeted and soft-lit, and a trailer cafeteria with a chalet-like interior, decorated with technicolour vivid pictures and posters of rolling desert and field landscapes. The staff are Pakistani and Philipino workers (for security reasons, to limit poisoning-possibilities), who serve up iced-tea, curries, tuna-pasta salads, fruit jellies, sponge-cakes and every all-American condiment you can think of. Contractors chow down with intelligence officers, and lone soldiers stir plates of tumeric-yellow oily spuds beside jabbering media spin-doctors and decree forgers. White marquees dot the approach to the 'palace', home to Nepalese Ghurka and Fijian troops, serving their British masters as security guards, patrolling the palace and manning the main back gate.
The offices of the BBC lie next to the palace, perfectly positioned to digest the freshly-fed news and regurgitate it to the British public, straight from the Chief's mouth, and into the inboxes of UK content and news controllers, monitoring with military precision what is allowed to be known, where the Occupation and any dying Iraqi civilians or soldiers, dropped off the news agenda along with the last shot-off limb.
Ewa in Basra
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