Iraqi police protest after British raid

By Alaa Habib

BASRA, Iraq (Reuters) – Iraqi police staged an angry
anti-British protest in Basra on Wednesday as London and
Baghdad sought to quell tension over a British raid to free
soldiers held by militiamen in the southern city.

About 200 policemen who work at the police station damaged
during the British raid marched through the streets, calling
for the city police chief to be fired and for the “British
terrorists” to be returned to Iraqi jurisdiction.

The Iraqi government said in a statement there was no
crisis with Britain, but senior Iraqi officials have castigated
the raid, with Basra province governor calling it a “barbaric
act.”

“Both governments are in close contact, and an inquiry will
be conducted by the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior into the
incident,” a statement from Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari’s
office said. It also urged calm on all sides.

Jaafari, returning from New York, was due to meet British
Defense Secretary John Reid in London at around 1300 GMT (0900
EDT).

Reid, under pressure at home over the deployment of 8,500
troops in Iraq and facing calls for a withdrawal timetable,
told a British newspaper Britain would not “cut and run.”

The diplomatic hitch follows a raid by British forces to
free two undercover soldiers who were detained by Iraqi
security forces in Basra following a firefight on Monday.

In the raid, British armored vehicles crushed the walls of
an Iraqi jail before troops rescued the men from a militia
group said by the British to have gained custody of them from
police.

But Iraq’s interior minister disputed the British
military’s account. Bayan Jabor told the BBC the men had never
left police custody or the jail in Basra and were not handed to
militants.

Basra, a mainly Shi’ite Muslim city, has experienced a
surge in militia activity over the past nine months, with armed
Shi’ite factions vying for influence in the security forces and
the local council.

The militias are also believed to have carried out attacks
on British troops, three of whom have been killed by roadside
bombs this month, and on journalists exposing their activities.

Iraqi authorities admitted that insurgents had infiltrated
the police and other security forces in Basra and elsewhere.

“Our Iraqi security forces in general, and these in
particular and in many parts of Iraq, I have to admit that they
have been penetrated by some of the insurgents,” National
Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie told the BBC on Tuesday.

He said he did not know the extent of the infiltration, but
said new procedures were in place to get rid of bad apples.

INFILTRATION

British commander Colonel Bill Dunham, chief of staff for
multinational forces in Basra, also pointed to security force
infiltration as a major problem. “It is something that affects
the Iraqi police across Iraq as a whole,” he told BBC Radio.

“We are aware of rogue elements in the Iraqi police
service. The trick that we have to pull off now with the Iraqi
authorities is to identify those elements, to weed them out and
to reinforce the good parts of the Iraqi police service.”

Britain has spent the past 2-1/2 years securing Basra and
building up its security forces in the expectation that Iraqi
forces could take over and allow British troops to withdraw.

The acknowledgement that more than two years’ work has
essentially failed to produce a functioning police force is
likely to provoke anger among Iraqis, whose chief concern has
always been security and who want foreign troops to leave.

AMERICANS KILLED

Southern Iraq is home to several Shi’ite militias,
including one loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr who
fiercely opposes the presence of foreign troops and has led
uprisings against the U.S. military. Many Iraqis say the
heavily armed militias act with impunity and are not answerable
to the central government.

Tensions in Basra had risen on Sunday when British forces
arrested three leading members of Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia.

In Baghdad on Wednesday, U.S. and Iraqi forces traded fire
for several hours with insurgents hiding out in a house in the
west of the city, before capturing one insurgent, police said.
Five rebels, two police and a soldier were killed, they said.

West of the capital and to the north, where a Sunni
Arab-led insurgency is fiercest, nine Americans, including five
troops, were killed in separate attacks on Monday and Tuesday.

The deaths raised to at least 1,907 the number of U.S.
troops to have died in Iraq since the war began.

(Additional reporting by Paul Majendie in London)