9.4 |
June 2005 to May 2006
government
and rule of [law] institutions is out of the question” and pulling
troops out
more
rapidly would leave a vacuum. The authors therefore
concluded:
“Our
only realistic option is to maintain our course and see the job
through.
But
we need to
make adjustments to our policy, while
sticking to our strategic
approach of
ensuring in due course successful transition of responsibility for
rule of
law in the
south-east to the Iraqis.”
271.
The paper
identified a practical problem; the possibility of reprisal attacks
against
UK
personnel made it questionable when UK civilian trainers and
mentors could return
to work
alongside Iraqis after their current period of
lockdown.
272.
The authors
recommended a number of actions including:
•
getting a
“clear commitment from Baghdad politicians to grip the
South-East”;
•
persuading
the Interior Minister to visit Basra immediately;
•
demonstrating
“to the international community (in particular, the US) that we
can
handle the
situation”;
•
putting an
“effective Chief of Police in place”; and
•
despatching
“a senior UK police officer (eg Sir Ronnie Flanagan) with
relevant
background
in such sectarian issues to audit the police in
MND(SE)”.
273.
The paper also
cautioned that “we may not be able to deliver, by next year,
the
minimum
standards required in rule of law and governance” and that “we will
need to
allocate
more resources, which might include military resources, to
security”.
274.
An Iraqi
investigation into the Jameat incident concluded by early October
that
“80 percent
of the blame was down to the British”.131
Mr Patey
reported that the ITG was
unlikely to
publish the investigation report as “we will have no choice but to
take issue
with it”.
Of most concern was the failure of the ITG to act on militia
infiltration of the
Basra
police.
275.
SIS3 told the
Inquiry that the event was a “wake-up call” to what was happening
in
Basra,
where the police had become integrated with the militias, and
commented that:
“What we
were looking for … was Iraqiisation. What we ended up with at this
point
was a
different kind of Iraqiisation … In other words, we were pulling
back and the
Iraqi
Government was not occupying the space, I think because it was too
early
for the
Iraqi Government to be able to do that. So in that gap you ended up
with a
different
kind of Iraqiisation, which was militia-isation, criminalisation,
intimidation,
131
eGram
14641/05 Baghdad to FCO London, 1 October 2005, ‘Iraq: Basra
Investigation’.
535