HH: Thanks for your service. Can you give us, because there’s a lot of reporting that Basra’s in chaos, and gone to hell in a hand basket since you folks have changed your deployment. What is the situation in Basra right now?
PS: Well, I don’t know where the reporting’s coming from. The situation that we see here is that Basra is pretty stable. When we were serving down in the Palace during the period from about May when we first arrived here until just at the beginning of September when we left, for the vast majority of that period, except for the last two weeks, it was hell in a hand basket. We took somewhere in the region of 2,000 rounds of indirect fire, we got hit by about 100 IED’s, and it’s pretty much 100% chance of getting involved in a firefight every time we went out. But 90% of that violence was directed against us and the Iraqi leadership in the form of, if you like, the security czar down here, a guy called General Mohan, who told us that we were part of the problem. We were confusing Shia loyalties, and that if they could, if he could deliver a ceasefire, the most constructive thing we could do would be to withdraw and to leave it to the Iraqi Security Forces to handle. And since we’ve withdrawn, violence in Basra has dropped down to, well, very, very low levels.
HH: Now behind that calm, is there a giving over of the city to radical Shia militias? Or is the Iraqi Security Forces stepping up and standing in?
PS: I don’t see the militias trying to exercise or fighting at the moment. Are the Iraqi Security Forces perfect? No, far from it. But what we’ve got is for the first time, probably, in the last four years, we’ve got some decent Iraqi leadership. We’ve got two generals, one in charge of the police, and one in overall command, who are both pretty determined to remain loyal to the central government. And they’ve effectively purged about 3,000 policemen and members of the armed forces out here, from the Iraqi armed forces, who are locals, and who really have been infiltrated, and have had loyalty to the militias rather than to the Security Forces. They’ve gone now. And increasingly, the balance of power lies with the Iraqi Security Forces rather than with the militias. It’s worth saying, though, that the militias, at the moment, are operating under pretty much a self-imposed ceasefire, so the situation is calm at the moment. It could break down again. As each day passes, we get a sense that, as I say, the balance of power is passing to the Iraqi Security Forces. And we can always re-intervene, if it’s necessary.
