The 5,000 Brits are confined to base. They don't patrol--they move convoys from the airport to Basra Palace, but they don't move around in any way to show their "control" over the city or the province, not since early on this year. This spring, because of mortar attacks, they had to move their consulate from Basra Palace to the airport. The airport is where the only large British military base in Iraq is. The Basra Palace is one of Saddam's bachelor pads in downtown Basra--lush gardens and villa-style living protected by 800 British soldiers and a 30ft high blast wall. But that wasn't safe anymore. And indeed the convoy run of just 8 miles from the airport is now being called a "suicide mission" by the soldiers who have to carry it out. So now the consulate has been forced to the airport base it's like they're running Her Majesty's offices from the fire escape. Mortar attacks are almost nightly. Killings of British soldiers are on the increase. 7 were killed this July and 8 in August--versus 0 in July and 1 in August of last year. That's how secure they are down there. If Bush starts a war with Iran, those 5,000 British soldiers will probably be slaughtered, unless they are immediately airlifted out of the country.
As for the Kurdish areas, they couldn't care less about the religious quarrels of Sunni Arabs and Shia Arabs to their south. They don't think of themselves as part of Iraq at all. Even when Saddam Hussein was still in power they had achieved a measure of autonomy thanks to the No-Fly Zones imposed by the Gulf-War coalition. They don't even allow the Iraqi flag to be flown--not even at parades of the Iraqi Army! Things are relatively quiet there, although the U.S. military occupies that region, because the mainspring of the conflict in the rest of the country just isn't present there. What you find in its place is an unambiguous, unquestionable hegemony of Kurdish militia, who are Sunni, and you find an Arab minority, which is also Sunni and which knows that the Kurds are in charge--so there's little to fight about. Quite a few Arabs have left these areas rather than become a target. Same thing in the Shia south, there is violence there-but the bulk of it now is violence between rival Shia militia-gangs. The numerical supremacy of the Shia is so overwhelming that there is little Shia militia v. Sunni militia violence. The Shia hegemony in Basra is absolute. I would be irresponsible to make it sound like sweetness and light: a main reason for the lack of ongoing Sunni-Shia conflict there is the successful ethnical cleansing of Basra by Shia militias.
Basra BetrayedBy last year the Sunni population of Iraq's second city (Basra) had fallen from 40 per cent in 2003 to just under 14 per cent. Several hundred from the community, including the most prominent Sunni cleric in the south of the country, Imam Yusuf Yaqub al-Hassan, had been murdered and more than 700 families evicted. A Sunni militia in Basra would have a life expectancy of a day or two. Much the same could be said about the British "occupation" of Basra: they are so outnumbered they don't dare show themselves and move about on the streets unless it is to resupply the isolated Basra Palace. If they get shot at less often than Americans, it is because there are only one thirtieth as many of them, they are not in the midst of hotspots of Sunni-Shia warfare like the Americans are, and their main mission is to stay in their defensive positions and not get shot. Still if you were to scale the British KIAs in Iraq from last month up proportionally to the size of the American force, it's as if 240 Brits were killed.
have a look at these:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2134086,00.htmlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2114608,00.htmlhttp://www.juancole.com/2007/02/blair-to-draw-down-british-troops-tony.htmlhttp://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2303009.ece