Friday, August 25, 2006
An Iraqi battalion attacked a military outpost.
WASHINGTON POST
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- British troops abandoned a major base in southern Iraq on Thursday and prepared to wage guerrilla warfare along the Iranian border to combat weapons smuggling, a move that anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called the first expulsion of U.S.-led coalition forces from an Iraqi urban center.
"This is the first Iraqi city that has kicked out the occupier!" trumpeted a message from al-Sadr's office that played on car-mounted speakers in Amara, capital of the southern province of Maysan. "We have to celebrate this occasion!"
Maj. Charlie Burbridge, a British military spokesman, said the last of 1,200 troops left Camp Abu Naji , just outside of Amara, at noon Thursday after several days of heavy mortar and rocket fire by a local militia, which local residents identified as the al-Sadr-controlled Mahdi Army. Adopting tactics used by a British special forces unit in North Africa during World War II, 600 of the soldiers will soon slip into the marshlands and deserts of eastern Maysan in an attempt to secure the Iranian border.
Change in tactics
The repositioning is the first public acknowledgment that forces from the U.S.-led military coalition in Iraq have entered into guerrilla warfare to combat the insurgents and militias that they have been fighting for more than three years.
The move also underscores both the rising power of al-Sadr's Shiite militia, which has clashed with American forces in an attempt to drive them out of the country, and burgeoning alarm over Shiite-ruled Iran's perceived role in exacerbating the sectarian violence roiling Iraq. U.S. officials have accused Iran of supplying weapons and bombs to Shiite militias here.
The withdrawal sparked wide-scale looting at the base and then intense clashes late Thursday night between Iraqi army forces guarding the camp and unknown attackers, a military intelligence official said. The volatile situation worsened when the 2nd battalion of the Iraqi army's 4th Brigade mutinied and attacked a local military outpost, said the official, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used.
The British soldiers, members of the Queen's Royal Hussars, are preparing to trade their heavy Challenger 2 tanks and Warrior fighting vehicles for lightweight Land Rovers, Burbridge said. They will become a flexible, mobile force with no fixed base and receive supplies by air drops.
"The Americans believe there is an inflow of IEDs and weapons across the border with Iran," said Burbridge, referring to improvised explosive devices, in a telephone interview from Basra. "Our first objective is to go and find out if that is the case. If that is true, we'll be able to disrupt the flow." He said the second goal was to train Iraqi border guards.