IRAQ. Patrick Cockburn

in Iraq, was reduced to advising his acolytes against extremism.

      Defeat in Baghdad and the extreme unpopularity of al Qa'ida gave the impulse for the formation of the 77,000-strong anti-al-Qa'ida Sunni militia, often under tribal leadership, which is armed and paid for by the US. But the creation of this force is a new stage in the war in Iraq rather than an end to the conflict.

      Sunni enclaves in Baghdad are safer, but not districts where Sunni and Shia face each other. There are few mixed areas left. Many of the Sunni fighters say openly that they see the elimination of al Qai'ida as a preliminary to an attack on the Shia militias, notably the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which triumphed last year.

      The creation of a US-backed Sunni militia both strengthens and weakens the Iraqi government. It is strengthened in so far as the Sunni insurrection is less effective and weakened because it does not control this new force.

      If the Sunni guerrillas were one source of violence in 2006 the other was the Mehdi Army, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia nationalist cleric. This has been stood down because he wants to purge it of elements he does not control, and wishes to avoid a military confrontation with his rivals within the Shia community if they are backed by the US army. But the Mehdi Army would certainly fight if the Shia community came under attack or the Americans pressured it too hard.

      American politicians continually throw up their hands in disgust that Iraqis cannot reconcile or agree on how to share power. But equally destabilising is the presence of a large US army in Iraq and the uncertainty about what role the US will play in future. However much Iraqis may fight among themselves, a central political fact in Iraq remains the unpopularity of the US-led occupation outside Kurdistan. This has grown year by year since the fall of Saddam Hussein. A detailed opinion poll carried out by ABC News, BBC and NTV of Japan in August found that 57 per cent of Iraqis believe that attacks on US forces are acceptable.

      Nothing is resolved in Iraq. Power is wholly fragmented. The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in Basra, that they have few permanent allies in Iraq. It has become a land of warlords in which fragile ceasefires might last for months and might equally collapse tomorrow.

      Monday, 17 December 2007

BRITAIN BOWS OUT OF A WAR IT COULD NEVER HAVE WON

      Britain handed over security in Basra province yesterday, bringing a formal end to its ill-starred attempt over almost five years to control southern Iraq.

      The transfer of power was marked by a parade of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police beside the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which runs past Basra. As helicopters roared overhead it was the biggest show of strength by the Iraqi army forces since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

      The majority of people in Basra were glad to see the British go. "You can see the happiness on the faces of everyone," said Adel Jassam, a teacher. "It feels like a heavy burden has been lifted off our chests."

      The unpopularity of the British presence is underlined by the results of an opinion poll commissioned by the BBC showing that just 2 per cent of people in Basra believed that the British presence had had a positive effect on their province since 2003. Some 86 per cent said they saw British troops as having a negative impact.

      Britain did not suffer a military defeat in southern Iraq, though it lost 134 soldiers and never really established control of the city, the second-largest in Iraq.

      By the time of yesterday's handover ceremony it had 4,500 troops in Iraq, confined to Basra airport, whose numbers will be reduced to 2,500 by mid-2008.

      The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who was at the ceremony in Basra, said that Britain was not handing over "a land of milk and honey". This is an understatement, since the Basra that Britain leaves behind will be controlled by semi-criminal Shia militias and political movements.

      "This remains a violent society whose tensions need to be redressed," said Mr Miliband, "but they need to be addressed by Iraqi political leaders, and it is politics that is going to come to the fore in the months and years ahead."

      The British Army some time ago concluded that its patrols simply provided targets for militiamen without doing any good.

      Last night Al Qaeda's second-in-command said the handover showed that insurgents were gaining the upper hand. In a video posted on the internet, Ayman al-Zawahri said: "Reports from Iraq point to the increasing power of the mujahideen and the deteriorating condition of the Americans. And the decision of the British to flee is sufficient [proof of this]."

      Mr Zawahri said that Iraq was still the most important theatre of battle for Islamist militants, and dismissed optimistic US assessments of the situation there.

      The steady retreat of the British has not so far been followed by a battle for Basra between the three main contenders for power. These are the Fadhila movement, which controls much of the government, the Mehdi Army militia, loyal to the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Badr Organisation of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).

      These groups control different units of the security forces, as well as valuable economic concessions, such as Basra port. Iran also retains a pervasive influence over the militias.

      Britain is officially handing over control of Basra to government security forces. This has supposedly long been the aim of the US and Britain in southern Iraq, but in practice both countries have favoured only one of the Shia parties, ISCI, as its favoured ally.

      Violence in Basra was never as bad as it was in Baghdad or Mosul, because the city was overwhelmingly Shia. The Sunni and other minority groups have been progressively driven out. The British Army never tried to impose its authority on the four southern provinces of Iraq to the degree that the US forces tried to win control of central Iraq.

      The area where they were meant to be bringing a better life is one of the most devastated in Iraq. Because it was Shia it was never favoured by the overwhelmingly Sunni regime of Saddam.

      The date palms for which southern Iraq was famous were burned or cut down. In the marshes where the Tigris and Euphrates meet, a distinct civilisation had survived for 5,000 years until Saddam drained them so they could no longer provide a sanctuary for his opponents.

      There seems to be no end to the miseries that Basra has suffered since the war with Iran started in 1980. The Iran-Iraq war was followed by the first Gulf War, and this in turn by the great Shia uprising of 1991, which began in a square in Basra when a tank gunner fired a shell into one of the omnipresent pictures of Saddam. In the fighting which followed, thousands of Shia were killed.

      The fall of Saddam was highly popular in Basra, as it was in the rest of Shia Iraq, but while liberation was popular, occupation was not.