Basra residents attack British troops

Even in the “calm” southern part of Iraq, it is clear the U.S.-British occupation of the country is in trouble.

After two British soldiers disguised as Arabs reportedly got in a firefight Sept. 19 with Iraqi police, killing two of them, hundreds of people in Basra flocked to the police station where they were supposedly being held.

When British troops surrounded the station, Iraqi demonstrators, some of them young boys, started pelting them with stones and gasoline bombs until the troops withdrew. Photographs and video footage showed British soldiers jumping from their burning vehicles, one with his uniform ablaze.

After the police defied orders by the puppet Baghdad government to hand the prisoners over to the British, Britain moved in troops and armor. Evidently fearing the undercover soldiers might tell what their mission was, they smashed down the walls of the prison. The two weren’t there, but were later found by the British.

Basra has had a number of bombings recently, and Iraqi police said the two soldiers were armed with explosives and rocket launchers.

The Sept. 21 Christian Science Monitor reported that a top official of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s movement, Abbas Rubaie, “has charged the two undercover British officers with planting roadside bombs in order to justify a longer military presence in the country. ...

“A statement from the Sadr movement claimed that the two British undercover officers had also been firing into a crowd of pilgrims Monday going to a local shrine to mark the birth of the Imam Mehdi, the 12th and last Imam, or Shiite saint.”

Meanwhile, in Iraq’s north, a series of resistance attacks killed a total of nine U.S. troops and mercenaries.

—John Catalinotto