| Long, long piece from The Independent, with all the progressive hand-wringing you'd expect. That said, we've known for a while that the Brits didn't manage Basra well, even as they sniffed at us for our handling of al-Anbar and Baghdad. If this article is anywhere close to correct southern Iraq is in big trouble. |
When they fled the city last summer, Sunnis such as the Hussein brothers had every reason to be afraid. The golden-domed Samarra shrine in central Iraq, the holiest in Shia Islam, had just been blown up, and the Sunni minority in southern Iraq was under threat. Family by family, they left the Sunni enclave of Abul Khaseeb, on the Shatt al-Arab waterway. "First we had red paint on the houses to mark us out as Sunnis," said Tahir. "Then we had warning letters telling us to leave. Then we had people killed. Rashid, a cousin of mine, was shot dead. We decided then it was time for us to go."
So why have they come back? The answer, far from indicating any confidence in the ability of British forces in Basra to maintain control and protect minorities, shows the opposite. The reason that Tahir and a few others are trickling back is that they believe that the Shia militias in Basra are too busy fighting their own turf wars to bother with a few Sunnis keeping their heads down.