LONDON, May 22: Thousands of British paratroopers are set to leave southern Iraq to take over US peacekeeping duties in Baghdad in a bid to restore order to the Iraqi capital, a London newspaper said on Thursday.

A US commander in Baghdad had said earlier this week that he expected his battalion to be relieved by British troops before the end of the month, but the top British civilian here said London was only expected to send small numbers of troops to the capital for specific tasks.

A senior British military source told the Daily Mirror plans were afoot to send the British troops into Baghdad because US soldiers were too tired and lacked the necessary peace-keeping skills.

“We have three months at best to get this right. It is absolutely crucial the people of Baghdad can be persuaded we are there to help them,” the source said.

“Otherwise, the whole point of the operation could totally collapse and we could have a new war on our hands against the Iraqi people we came to liberate,” the source added.

“After 30 years of being in Northern Ireland, as well as the Balkans, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, we know we have those skills and have offered our help.”

The source told the paper: “The American troops in Baghdad are not doing that. They are tired, they want to go home and they do not have the training for the job that needs to be done.”

Another British military source told the paper: “Nobody is saying the US can’t do soldiering. They captured Baghdad brilliantly. But war fighting and peace keeping are very different.”

The Daily Mirror said the 5,500 paratroopers, currently on peace-keeping duties in the British sector of southern Iraq around the country’s second city Basra, could be airlifted to Baghdad within weeks.

The paratroopers, part of the 16 Air Assault Brigade, were due to return home in the next few weeks but could now be in Iraq until the autumn, the paper said.

A defence ministry official dismissed the Mirror’s report as “speculation.”

“All sorts of options are under consideration for all sorts of possible eventualities,” he told the paper.

But the commander of the US 141st Field Artillery Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel James E. Lackey, told AFP Tuesday that he expected his troops, who are responsible for a large swathe of north Baghdad on the east of the Tigris, to be relieved by British troops by the end of the month.

“We’re desperate for the Brits to get here, our guys had a pretty tough war.”

One of Lackey’s officers, First Lieutenant Trey Jasso, acknowledged that his field artillery unit was unsuitable for the sort of policing and urban guerrilla warfare role that it was now being expected to take on.

“We’re a field artillery unit, we’ve been through 23 days of hard fighting and we don’t have the training or experience for this sort of role,” he said.—AFP