WAR CRIME Chapter 3

Chapter Three

Improvised Explosive Devices (Bombs)

Between July 2003 and my next visit a year later, Iraq became unstable, unpredictable and dangerous. I wouldn't be wandering around Baghdad or Basra on my own any more.

On August 8th 2003, a bomb in a minibus exploded outside the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad. It killed seventeen people and was so powerful that it lifted a car onto a nearby rooftop.

The attack on the embassy gave birth to a new acronym - VBIED (Vehicle-Born Improvised Explosive Device, pronounced Veebid).

Although he never admitted it, the main suspect was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of a Jordanian terrorist group. His motive may have been to punish Jordan's King Abdullah for offering asylum to the daughters of Saddam Hussein. Or it may have been for the King secretly allowing the military airbase at Azraq in eastern Jordan to be used by Coalition aircraft during the invasion in March - secretly because there had been angry demonstrations in Jordan against the invasion of Iraq. Masked protesters burned American, British and Israeli flags. Riot police were deployed. One day I watched as they ran at protesters, beating them in the chest and head with their batons. Lawyers in the protest wearing their black gowns were also attacked.

Once the war had started I drove my rental car to Azraq to verify the rumours that the air base was being used to support the invasion. The Jordanian government denied it, saying they would only permit Coalition aircraft to overfly the country but insisting that no part of the invasion could originate from Jordanian soil. 

An exclusion zone was imposed around Azraq, with a couple of checkpoints on the road from Amman. Fortuitously, I was able to get past them without being challenged because I'd offered a lift to a man standing at the side of the road. My luck was that he was a Jordanian policeman, and that he was seemingly unconcerned that I was a foreigner heading into a military exclusion zone.

It was close to midday, and as we drove off he asked me if I would mind if he switched on the car radio. He tuned it to a religious station and joined in the Islamic chants. As we approached the checkpoints, his colleagues recognised him sitting next to me, waved, and raised the barriers to let us through.

I dropped him off when we reached Azraq, & drove out of town for a couple of minutes looking for a spot where I could discretely observe the airbase.

I parked the car in the shade of some olive trees close to the end of the runway and watched several Coalition fighter jets and C130 transport aircraft taking off and heading east towards Iraq.

As I drove out of the olive grove after my bout of plane-spotting (or was it spying?) I noticed in my rear-view mirror a green military police Land Rover with its blue lights flashing.

I pulled over.

One of the policemen walked up to my window and asked - in English - where I was going.

"To Azraq." (Always tell the truth. But never more than is asked.)

And why was I going there?

"To find somewhere to eat." (Also true.)

He didn't ask why I’d been parked so close to the airbase.

He returned to the Land Rover and had an earnest discussion with his colleague.

He ambled back to me.

"We both agree," he said, "that the best place to eat is not the first restaurant that you come to as you enter the town but the second."

The restaurant had a neon Bugs Bunny sign outside it, and was owned by a man called Rommel. His father had been an admirer of the second world war German field-marshal, The Desert Fox Erwin Rommel.

I had kebab and rice and tea, and I smoked shisha.

If the attack on the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad was startling, the next - on August 19th - was even more so. A bomb in a truck exploded outside the headquarters of UNAMI, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq. It killed twenty-two people, including the United Nations's special representative Sérgio Vieira de Mello. The shock at this was compounded by the fact that he was widely admired as an honourable and decent man.

Abu Musab al Zarqawi admitted carrying out that attack.

A year later Zarqawi merged his organisation with that of the fugitive Osama bin Laden, creating Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The next egregious atrocity came from a different direction. On 29 August 2003 a senior Shia cleric and leading politician Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim was assassinated outside the holiest of holy places in Iraq, the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf. He had just delivered a sermon in which he emphasised the need for Iraqi unity and as he was leaving the mosque he was killed by a huge car bomb. It also ended the lives of about seventy-five people in a large crowd around him.

It was immediately obvious that the attack was the work of experts with military experience. The bomb was detonated remotely and exploded exactly as Hakim walked out of the mosque.

No group admitted carrying out the assassination, but two factions in particular stood to gain: followers of another more radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr, and al Qaeda in Iraq in alliance with remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime. Saddam loyalists had a visceral loathing of the Shia Muslim majority and feared that the Americans were clumsily creating the circumstances in which Shi’ite Iraqis would take over the country.

Both groups had reason to resent Hakim, whose attitude to the US occupation had changed - from initial condemnation to pragmatic accommodation. He was head of SCIRI, the Supreme Council of the Revolution in Iraq which took part in the transitional governing council set up by the Americans. Hakim had spent more than twenty years in exile in Iran as a fugitive from Saddam Hussein, but he did not want his country to become an Iraqi version of Iran's theocracy. He told the Reuters news agency, "We should not make a copy of the Iranian revolution."

Two months later- on the first day of the fasting month of Ramadan - another forty people were killed in a series of bombings in Baghdad - carried out almost simultaneously on four police stations and on the headquarters of the International Red Cross. Two people working for the ICRC were killed.

After these spectacular attacks on prominent foreign organisations and the assassination of the relatively moderate Hakim, the number of UK staff at the BBC's bureau in Baghdad was reduced. If I wanted to continue reporting from the country I would have to apply for 'embeds' with British or American forces.

I applied for both, emphasising in my applications that I was not a war correspondent and that I was looking for access to reconstruction projects and other activities designed to improve the lives of Iraqi civilians. That way, I hoped, I would also meet many Iraqis. I did.

Some friends and colleagues wondered how I could embed with the US or UK military without losing my freedom to report frankly and objectively and without spin or censorship. I argued that the armed forces of both countries were as much part of the story of post-war Iraq as anyone else, and that the only way I could gain any knowledge of what they were doing was to be with them.

And it turned out that I was never censored or subjected to pressure, and I filed reports unmonitored whenever I wished - using a portable satellite dish that linked me directly to the BBC in London.

But of course my embed hosts were in complete control of where I was allowed to go.

And on British embeds, there were some naive attempts at spin, but not many. On American embeds there were none that were apparent, and I was allowed access to daily intelligence briefings so long as I agreed to stick to uncontroversial rules such as not revealing identities or future operational locations.

Embedding with the British in Basra I had to accept that I might witness some combat - since I'd last been there in the summer of 2003 the city had become a war zone. By the autumn, Basra's patience with the sclerosis of the British occupation was running out. During angry demonstrations, British troops were attacked by Basrawis demanding a reliable supply of electricity and fuel. The cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was emerging as leader of a well-organised and violent resistance, composed of the political Sadrist Movement and its almost indistinguishable 'military wing' known as the Mahdi army (Jaish al Mahdi).

Not powerful enough to fight the occupiers on a large scale, the ‘JAM’ mounted guerilla attacks on British troops as they drove around, and sabotaged supply convoys. Muqtada was passionate and articulate, and although only thirty years old he was recognised and respected as a resistance leader principally because three members of his family had been murdered for opposing Saddam Hussein. His father, his grandfather and his father-in-law were each revered Shia clerics who had consistently agitated against Saddam Hussein and campaigned for justice for the poor.

They were all executed.

Sustained Violence.

During 2003 and 2004, attacks on the British became routine.

Soldier shot in sniper attack.

Three soldiers killed in ambush.

British officer killed by roadside bomb.

Mortar shell hits UK military HQ at Basra Airbase.

Battle in Basra between Mahdi army militia & British troops.

Six British military police killed at a police station near Basra.

Crowd attacks British armoured vehicles with firebombs and rockets.

Rewards offered for killing British soldiers.

In May 2004, British forces suppressed an uprising by hundreds of Muqtada al-Sadr's militia who attacked British patrols and set up their own checkpoints. In August that year guerilla warfare against the British in Basra reached its height. Nearly five hundred militia - often helped by the police - attacked British foot patrols with blast bombs, and ambushed Warrior tanks, expertly aiming at them exactly where their armour was weakest. One British base in the city centre was hit by dozens of rockets and rocket-propelled grenades.

A group of soldiers aged between 18 and 29 told me what it had been like for them:

“Quite hectic.

Getting mortared every day for 28 days, no sleep.

It just wears you down.

You can hear the mortar shells popping in the distance when they're launched, and you know they're on their way but you don't know where they're going to land. You try to take cover and hope they don't come through the roof.

A rocket came through two walls while I was brushing my teeth. Luckily the warhead didn't explode.

Bullets flying ten centimetres above your head, it was like Star Wars.

You can't think, you just return fire. If you start thinking, you're dead and you're going to come home in a coffin.

When it's over you go into the cookhouse and you think, Jesus Christ what have I just been in?”

When British troops came under fire from the 'Office of the Martyr Sadr', rules of engagement permitted the British to stage a significant reprisal attack. Being shot at from the party headquarters of the supposedly political Sadrist Movement stripped away its veneer and revealed it as a front for the Mahdi army militia. After a fourteen hour operation by more than two hundred soldiers, the British captured the building and its occupants. And its arsenal. Fourteen tons of arms and ammunition - grenades, mortar tubes, rocket launchers, AK-47s, mortar rounds, machine guns, Katyusha rockets, and roadside bombs. Laid out side by side to be catalogued and photographed, this loot stretched for twenty-five metres.

Intelligence sources believe the weapons came either from former regime arms dumps or from Iran. Or both. The militia paid for their arms with crime - extortion, carjacking, weapons trafficking, protection rackets, and kidnap ransoms.    

To reach my embed with the British in Basra, I was met on the Kuwait side of the Iraqi border by Lieutenant Commander Ahmed Adjala. With a map spread out on the bonnet of an unmarked Range Rover, RAF Sergeant Doug Shorter gave a briefing. He said the main hazard on the fifty mile trip to Basra was carjacking.

"Range Rovers are the most favoured target. If we come under contact from small arms fire, whoever is sat in the front in the lead vehicle will return fire through the windscreen. We will attempt to drive through the contact. If we do get stopped and are down onto foot, make sure you have some water with you and hang on to our webbing - where we go you'll follow."

"How often has any of that happened to you?" I asked.

 Two replies.

"I've been here five weeks and nothing at all yet."

"I've been here three months and I've never seen it."

And off we went, with the car radio tuned to British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS) on FM.  I caught a brief snatch of a discussion, chaired by the historian and former BBC defence editor Christopher Lee, about growing suspicions that the famed link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda had been fabricated and was non-existent.

As we drove on we passed a sign, in English:

"Iraq border ahead - beware of children in the roadway."

A small Iraqi flag hung limply from a pole, shifting slightly as we passed.  Another sign in English, spray-painted onto a piece of concrete:

"Slow down; respect Iraqis and other road users."

"Other road users includes camels," said Lcdr Adjala. The driver Doug Shorter added, "We have to show respect, we're in their land, and at the end of the day we rely on their consent to stay here and we have to keep that consent to make sure that they don't tolerate the insurgents."

The desert was sandy and flat and dazzlingly bright. After we'd overtaken a convoy of tankers bringing diesel fuel for the British and the Americans, there were few other vehicles - and no camels or children. Narrow-gauge oil pipelines ran parallel to the road. We passed an oil refinery with storage tanks. Here and there in this bleak hot wilderness, there were bright flames of gas being flared off. After about an hour, we reached the checkpoint at the entrance to the British base at Basra international airport.

About eight thousand troops were living here, sleeping in rows of identical steel cabins painted green, with two beds in each. They'd been given addresses inspired by London street names in the game of Monopoly.

I was allotted 12, Oxford Street.

Neighbouring avenues included Whitehall, Park Lane and Pall Mall. A traffic circle on the base was named Go To Jail! Square.

In the window of a hut close to mine there was a printed sign - No Entry Unless You've Got Really Big Boobs.

There were arched steel roofs above the huts to protect them from mortar or rocket attack, and they were shielded from ground-level explosions by chest-high sandbags known as Hescos, or 'concertainers' - collapsible fabric-and-steel-mesh containers filled with sand. Outside one group of huts, some residents of this surreal steel village had decorated the Hescos with plastic pot plants, plastic flowers and plastic models of white birds. Attached to one of the sandbags, a laminated sheet of A4 advertised: "Babble-on Gardens - Visitors Most Welcome."

There was an armed forces NAAFI supermarket, aggressively air-conditioned and drenched in Muzak. It stocked essential supplies for the troops; toothpaste, shampoo, soap, detergent. There was a gym - with weights, treadmills and fixed bicycles. And there were several bars - with a two-can limit for each person and a card stamped with a record of what you'd had.

One bar was like a pub - snooker table, dartboard and wide-screen TV. Shrek 2 was showing when I was there.

In this British bubble in the desert there were also several hundred Iraqis - many of them interpreters. Most were reluctant to let me use their names in my reports, fearing that militias would attack them or their families if they discovered that they were working for the British. One told me he already knew of friends who had been threatened - either by anonymous letter or face-to-face.

Supervising the kitchen hands in the cook house, 18-year-old Hayder was happy to share just his first name. He said he was pleased with his job as it earned him $160 a month - a lot of money at the time for a young Iraqi.

My conversations with Iraqis were never monitored by press officers, my reports never listened to before they were broadcast, and I was free to wander around on my own.

While I was on the base the British issued a revised version of their 'white card' rules of engagement - updated for the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan:

"Do not eat drink or smoke during the day where you can be seen by Iraqis. Do not over-react when confronted by over-excited people: think what sort of mood you'd be in if you hadn't eaten or had a drink or a smoke all day."

I interviewed the senior soldier on the base, the commander of the British battle group in southern Iraq, Brigadier Andrew Kennet. As I walked into his office he said nothing, turned his back to me, walked to his desk, and sat down behind it without even a murmur of a greeting.

Staring at my shoes he said, "If I had my way, I'd have nothing to do with you. I hate the media."

I assured him that I wouldn't judge the entire British army by the standards of its own few rotten apples - like the men accused of torturing the Basra hotel receptionist Baha Mousa and of beating him to death.

We got on just fine after that.

Brigadier Kennet told me that during the recent troubles with the militia, a 'moderate' local politician had come up to him and warned, "If you damage any of the holy places, I will kill you myself."

He was alluding to a battle that had taken place between the US army and the Mahdi militia in the centre of Najaf, where there had been intense fighting and bombardment in the Old City close to the sacred shrine of Imam Ali. Homes, shops and hotels were damaged, and two of the minarets of the Imam Ali mosque were hit by artillery shells.

Brigadier Kennet said he was proud that he and his men had fought the same militia in Basra with none of that kind of damage. "I could have razed Basra to the ground," he told me, "I chose not to. The people thanked me for that."

Implicitly criticising American tactics in Najaf and in Fallujah, another British officer told me, "We don't believe in kicking doors in." He also said the British didn't go in for collective punishment, as it tended to alienate entire neighbourhoods and risked recruiting young men as insurgents.

Brigadier Kennet said the British had learned this lesson 'the hard way' in Northern Ireland, where they did kick in doors in the early 1970s. That approach led to many people being interned without trial, and helped the IRA develop into the deadly terrorist network that it subsequently became. Until then its initials had often been mocked as standing for 'I Ran Away'

I suggested to Brigadier Kennet that his battles with the Mahdi Army had been complicated by the commonly held belief that Basra's chief of police Brigadier Muhammad al-Ali had a close relationship with the militia. Kennet confirmed it: "We have to tolerate that: the man's got to live here long after we've gone." He added: "He's very rude about me sometimes. On a personal level, we get on very well. I like him. I know that he's a brave man, he's extremely personable, he's got a great sense of humour. In some circumstances I suspect we might be quite good friends."

I wondered what Brig. Kennet thought about dealing directly with the militia - talking to them.

"Keeping lines of communication open - particularly with terrorists," he replied, "is an established principle."

That principle had also emerged from Northern Ireland, where a back-channel between the secret  intelligence service MI6 and the IRA was first established in 1972.

Later the same day, I was taken out on a British Army foot patrol led by B Company of the Cheshire Regiment. We walked round a shockingly impoverished district of Basra called Jumhuriya (which means Republic) - British soldiers on foot in the heat and the dust and the dirt, armed with rifles and wearing berets (but with helmets hanging from their belts in case of trouble).

We went to a market area known for its support for Muqtada al Sadr. His Mahdi army had attracted many unemployed young Basra men whose lives had not noticeably improved since the defeat of Saddam Hussein.

As we walked past grim concrete blocks of flats, Major Dan Guest said he understood why some men join the militia:

"You've got guys living in there, unemployed, earning a couple of dollars a week if they're lucky and if somebody comes up to them and offers them $100 to attack a British base it's a no-brainer, they're going to do it."

We stepped around piles of rubbish and wide pools of overflowing sewage. Overseeing reconstruction projects, Major Simon Wildgoose believed the drains and the sewers hadn't been properly maintained for more than ten years - as part of a policy of deliberate neglect by Saddam Hussein of the Shia areas of southern Iraq where the 1991 uprising against him had begun. One consequence was that unmaintained sewers collapsed and sewage backed up and flooded the streets.

It was a hot sunny day. The air was thick with flies, hundreds of them, so many that I was reluctant to speak in case they flew into my mouth. Children walking with us past the pools of sewage had only flip-flops on their feet.

In Tamaniya market (the word means composure, or serenity) in Basra city centre, half a dozen men standing in the shade near the door of a busy café caught my eye and smiled and beckoned me inside. On the walls, several posters of Muqtada al Sadr.

Through an Iraqi interpreter I asked them, "How are your lives now?"

A chorus of replies: "No electricity, no drinking water, no freedom, this is occupation, only occupation. What kind of life can you expect if you're occupied?"

I asked if these problems were new, or did they also have them under Saddam Hussein?

"It was like this before but it's got much worse under the British occupation."

But a date merchant, Favel Taher, denounced that comment as "primitive", and said he welcomed the occupation. He offered greetings and thanks to George Bush and Tony Blair. I asked him if he had any sense of public opinion about this in Basra.

"Fifty-fifty," he replied. But the crowd gathered around us chorused their disagreement and protested that there was no support at all for his opinion.

There were small radios and CD players on sale in the market, and other cheap flimsy electronic equipment made in China.

A man came up to me with an urgent enquiry.

"Football? Manchester United?"

No, I said.

"Liverpool?"

No.

"Arsenal?"

Yes!

Much laughter. Iraq is football crazy.

As we walked on, there were cries of "Kahraba makou" (no electricity).

In places, the market was more like an open-air department store. There were air conditioning units, fridges, freezers, cookers, TVs, satellite decoders, satellite dishes, and petrol generators stacked in cardboard boxes outside many of the shops - made by Toshiba, Panasonic and Sanyo.

Customers here included British soldiers. But not in person; they ordered goods from the market and paid locally employed Iraqi workers to deliver them to their base. 

The amiable press officer with me Major Charlie Mayo went into one of the restaurants next to the main Basra Canal and emerged with cans of Pepsi.

I recognised one of these cafés - when I'd been wandering round this area in the dark the previous year I'd taken photographs of some of the café customers. Coming back here I'd brought copies of the photos with me, and asked the manager to pass them on to anyone he recognised.

He knew several of the faces.

And when he came to a photo of a little boy in ill-fitting jeans grinning at the camera, he laughed in surprise and delight: "That's my son!"

As a reward he gave me a can of Sprite.

"Good PR, Hugh!" commented Charlie Mayo.

That had not been my intention. But the British army needed some good PR. The British funded many small projects in Basra to try to reduce the stain of neglect that had been left by the Saddam Hussein regime. But the projects were too small and too few.

In a convoy of Land Rovers, their windows shielded by metal grills, I was taken to visit one of them. The army wanted me to see the new steel roof and concrete floor that they'd installed at a fish market. Very basic, no frills at all. But a necessary and welcome improvement; before the new floor was put down most of the trading in the fish market had been done on rough ground, unprotected from mud, dust and sewage.

To publicise projects like the Jumhuriya fish market, the British army printed a monthly Arabic-language newspaper, The Minaret. But it felt to me naïve to expect a flimsy paper publication to have any significant impact on the anger that was fueling recruitment to the militia. To rectify the core problems of unemployment, electricity, clean drinking water and fly-infested neighbourhoods overflowing with sewage would require serious investment.

"Dirty. Dirty and dangerous," said one man to me (in English) as I walked along the foul streets.

"No good, very no good," said another.

They're Shooting at Us Now

At a repatriation ceremony on the tarmac at Basra airbase a bugler played the Last Post for two British soldiers dismembered when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded inside the cab of their Land Rover. Their coffins, each draped with a Union flag, were carried solemnly up the rear ramp of an RAF Hercules transport plane. The sun sank towards the desert and a hot wind blew streaks of sand across the runway.

A piper played ‘The Lament’ - Flowers of the Forest.

A morning intelligence briefing revealed the latest 'threat message' - which included a tip-off from local sources that eight rockets had recently been transported into the city in preparation for some form of attack.

But at the once-luxurious Shatt al Arab Hotel - now another British army base - it was a mortar shells, not rockets. The disused hotel was full of fading Saddam-era extravagance - chandeliers, an ornate garden, a traffic roundabout planted with shrubs, and an L-shaped swimming pool. But the chandeliers were dusty, the pool was empty and the plumbing in the bathrooms didn't work; instead there was a row of plastic Portaloo toilets outside in the car park, and Portacabins with showers - with instructions to save water by 'ship showering': "Quick Wet, Water Off, Soap and Shampoo, Water On, Quick Rinse, Water Off."

One morning a genial Basrawi called Ali was showing me around his shop in a large brown tent on the base.

"I sell everything I think the soldiers they need. I get it from the market, everything. Cigarettes, mp3 players, TVs, DVD players with screens, PlayStation 2 they are $100, digital cameras they are from $120 to $190, DVD films they are $5."

Boom 

 ....just $5 each one.  They shooting now."

Boom

"This is the al Sadr militia. No good."

Boom

"They shooting at us." 

Boom

"Mortars." 

I went outside. Ideally in a mortar attack you should shelter under 'hard cover' - in a building with a solid roof. But this was a wide open space with nothing but army tents and a single concrete anti-blast wall.

But which side of it to shelter?

"Which way are they coming from?" I asked.

"This side."

Wrong.

But the last shell had fallen. Mortar attacks seldom last long - mortar teams need to be swift so that they can get away before their position is located, plotted and targeted.

As the attack began Private Nadia James from London had been sitting an 'NVQ' vocational qualifications examination.

"It was a bit distracting when I was trying to do a test," she told me with a grin.

In the cookhouse tent, Corporal Jason Jones from Gloucester had been making cheese balls.

"I had to turn all the gas cylinders for the cookers off." By the time he'd finished turning them off, three shells had exploded.

"So you secured the kitchen before you looked after yourself?"

"Yes." 

Five shells detonated, and another two landed but didn't go off; so-called 'blinds'. Staff Sergeant (and medic) Jim McGarry checked for casualties. There were none.

If you hear the bang," he reassured me with a laugh, "You know it's missed you."

On a wall nearby, some gallows-humour graffiti. "If you see ATO running, try and keep up with him." ATO is an Ammunition Technical Officer. They defuse bombs.

Other wall wit included:

"Never tell the platoon Sgt you have nothing to do"

and:

The same evening, acting on intelligence from Iraqis, there was an operation to try to catch the leader of the mortar team.

He wasn't at home. And it might not have been him. The soldiers searched his house anyway and found a Kalashnikov rifle, which residents were allowed to keep at home for personal protection.

In the twilight, a British army helicopter flew low over the neighbourhood, achieving nothing and increasing tension on the ground. The commander of the operation spoke angrily into his radio ordering the helicopter to go away. It did.

Another cinder-block home was searched. Soldiers poked through a sack of rice on the cement-floor kitchen, looking for side-arms and ammunition. They didn't find any. The young couple living in the house invited me inside. In a red plastic basket on the floor of the living room under a bare light bulb a tiny baby lay fast asleep. Sara. Three weeks old.

Her mother pointed proudly to the only picture on the wall - a framed image of the faces of the three revered Shia imams: Ali, Hussein and Abbas. Baby Sara's father leaned wearily against a doorway and stroked the heads of his older son and daughter aged four and five.

As darkness settled a car approached down a dirt track, its single working headlight silhouetting children walking in the dust. This was a poor neighbourhood of Basra and, like most of Iraq, all that the people wanted was work and security.

The Nerve of Life

There were many reasons for Iraq's increasingly dire shortage of electricity - neglect, sanctions, sabotage, rapidly growing demand, and the fact that most of the country's power stations were commissioned in the 1980s.

Before the 1991 Gulf War, electricity supply in Iraq was almost double what was required. But most of the power stations and many transmission lines and substations were damaged in that conflict. Sanctions imposed after the invasion of Kuwait made it worse by limiting access to spare parts. By 2003 the power stations were generating barely half the demand - less than half during some of the hot summer months. Keeping up with demand was made even harder after the 2003 war when thieves hauled down electricity pylons in the desert to recover copper from the transmission cables.

To learn more about the electricity challenge I was driven twenty miles out of Basra, through the desert to the Khor Az Zubayr dispatch and control centre - the electricity switching centre for all of southern Iraq. I went with two British Territorial Army officers, Major Paul Cairns of the UK's Network Rail and Captain John Cooper from Drax power station in northern England. In uniform and with their rifles clattering as they walked up the stairs, they were greeted with smiles and hugs by the centre's director Samad Qays. 

"These two men," this fluent-English speaker told me, "have become my best friends. I will ask their boss to keep them here in Iraq."

The two soldier engineers had known each other since joining the volunteer Territorial Army thirty years earlier. They were coming to the end of six months in Iraq - helping to upgrade electricity supply and distribution, and to improve protection against sabotage and theft. They'd installed security fences around the switching centre and a CCTV camera for surveillance. Mr. Qays asked if he could have two or three more cameras as the single one had a limited field of vision and was easy to evade. The engineers promised to see what they could do - probably with funding from 'the Cerp' (pronounced serp), the British army's Commanders Emergency Reserve Provision.

It was quiet in the switching centre control room, apart from the hum of electronic equipment and the occasional buzz of a printer. There was low lighting, and a mimic board representing the outputs of the four major thermal power stations of southern Iraq. The output of two of them was zero. This was causing consternation among Mr. Qays and his colleagues - if there's a fault anywhere in the system, zero power can lead to a catastrophic chain reaction known as a cascade trip; Capt. Cooper described it as "going all the way through the system and shutting everything off like falling dominoes."

This was a serious problem for Basra that morning. It wasn't even midday yet, the temperature was already in the high forties Celsius (nearly 120°F), and the city had no power. None. Control room managers held urgent discussions with staff at each power station, ordering load-shedding - rationing power to parts of the network in turn, and shutting off the rest to prevent overloading and potential turbine failure.

There was another problem that morning - on the mimic board the figure for the frequency of the alternative current on the network was 48.95 cycles per second (Hz). It should have been 50Hz. That too was a serious threat to the turbines, Mr. Qays told me.

Samad Qays had received death threats from Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army militia - not for his collaboration with British military engineers but for what they regarded as his personal responsibility for failing to provide Basra with enough electricity.

Local sheikhs ‘aligned’ with the militia invited Mr. Qays to visit them to explain the power shortage.

He accepted the invitation.

When he got there the door was locked behind him and it became clear to Mr. Kays that the sheikhs intended to kidnap him. He was told he wouldn't be allowed to leave.  

His response, he told me, was to shame them: "You, like me, are Arabs. And you have invited me to come to see you to explain the electricity problems. And now you are threatening to kidnap me? I spit on you."

He was allowed to leave.

Mr. Qays' next move with the militia sheikhs was just as bold.

"I invited the Muqtada al-Sadr representative from Basra to come to lunch here at the switching centre. He came, and he saw the problems for himself.”

Did that have the desired effect?

“He was convinced. Not completely, but we can say eighty percent."

And since then, I asked, had they stopped threatening him?

"No. They were quiet for a month, and then they started again. They've threatened me and my staff many times. They even said they would set fire to my home with my family inside it."

I asked Samad Qays if he believed there was a clear link between a dependable electricity supply and peace.

"Of course!" he replied, "Electricity is the nerve of life - of modern life - for everything."

On a later visit to Iraq, I asked the chief engineer at one of Baghdad's main power stations (Baghdad south, pictured) the same question.

"When you have electricity," he replied, "you can shut the mouths of all the people who say ‘we had good electricity in Saddam's time’. If we can have good electricity now, this is a very, very good weapon against Saddam supporters, because then they will feel there really is a difference between the past and now."

"But if you have electricity, will it shut the mouths of the terrorists?" I wondered.

"Of course! Sure!" 

He spelled it out. With a decent power supply, businesses would be more likely to succeed, confidence in the economy would return, and the allure of the militia as a source of income for the unemployed would be reduced. (A no-brainer, as the British army major said.)

And, significantly, the first group that this engineer specified as an enduring menace to Iraq was not the militias or the Islamists, but the ‘remnant’ Saddam supporters.

Around Baghdad, many images of their dead hero had been defaced - and in one case shot in the forehead - but they had not gone away.