The final 500 British troops in Basra city last night withdrew under the cover of darkness from their base, a former palace of Saddam Hussein.
The highly symbolic pullout from Basra Palace began at about 10pm local time. Residents then reported seeing helicopters overhead and a convoy of eight tanks, six Land Rovers and five other large vehicles, possibly armoured personnel carriers, approaching the main British airport base from the palace shortly before midnight.
The streets of the city were largely deserted, and the convoy of troops from the 4th Battalion The Rifles was not attacked. Troops at the palace suffered daily attacks over the summer, with nine members of The Rifles being killed since May 21.
Basra airport will now be the only base for the 5,500 soldiers still serving in southern Iraq. With the palace base handed to the Iraqis, the Government is expected to announce that the British presence in Iraq will be reduced by 500 within the next few weeks...
The pullout came as two of Britain’s most influential generals during the Iraq war delivered scathing attacks on the Americans for their handling of the campaign after Saddam’s defeat. Major-General Tim Cross, who supervised reconstruction projects alongside his American counterparts in 2003, joined General Sir Mike Jackson, former head of the Army, in criticising the US for ignoring British advice. General Cross, a Royal Engineer, is retired but he was a hugely respected figure in the Army and had unrivalled experience in dealing with postwar nation-building. He revealed that he gave advice to Don-ald Rumsfeld, the former US Defence Secretary, about the size of the force needed to tackle the challenges after Saddam’s downfall, but was ignored.
The attacks by General Jackson, the former Chief of the General Staff, in his autobiography, and General Cross, in an interview with the Sunday Mirror, have laid bare the anger felt by the British military over the way that Mr Rumsfeld dismissed all the warning signs of a potential disaster in Iraq.
Although much has been said about the failures of the American strategy in Iraq, not least by Sir Jeremy Green-stock, the former British Ambassador at the United Nations and later Tony Blair’s special envoy to Baghdad, the strong criticism from the two generals has added to the growing sense of a rift between Washington and London...
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