LONDON, Sept 20: Pictures of a British soldier engulfed by flames while leaping from an armoured vehicle firebombed by a mob in Basra punctured notions on Tuesday that the country’s forces are safer in Iraq than their US counterparts.
Newspapers in Britain ran front-page photos of a soldier fleeing a Warrior armoured vehicle set alight by petrol bombs in Iraq’s main southern city while the army was storming a jail to rescue two other soldiers.
The photos and events surrounding them rekindled long-held public anxieties over how safe British troops were in Iraq and how long the US-led occupation would last.
Such a dramatic photo “represents the actual, not the imagined, state of the British army in southern Iraq,” the Evening Standard newspaper said in an editorial.
“We had been led to suppose that Basra, the centre of British operations in Iraq, was a relatively peaceful area,” it said.
“Now we know different,” the daily said.
British forces have claimed they were winning over the Iraqi people by taking a softer approach than their US counterparts, such as conducting patrols without body armour.
The army said it ended up having to storm a police jail in a bid to rescue two soldiers detained by Iraqi police, allies in post-Saddam Iraq, after negotiations failed to win their release.
It added that the two soldiers were not in the jail but had been handed over to a Shia militia, though officers said it was still unclear whether police had surrendered them willingly.
Meanwhile, a mob attacked the troops involved in the rescue, though three soldiers, including the one pictured in the photographs, escaped with only minor injuries, the defence ministry said.
The newspaper called for Britain to increase troops to re-establish order in the short run before launching a ‘speeded-up exit strategy’.
The Daily Telegraph, which ran a front-page photograph of a soldier engulfed in flames, said the violence in the British-controlled sector cast doubt on the government’s plans for an early withdrawal from the south of Iraq.
The Daily Mail ran the headline ‘Torched’.
“Welcome to the surreal world of a ‘liberated’ Iraq where brave British soldiers are daily putting their lives on the line — and are cast as the villains of the piece for their pains,” the tabloid said.
The Daily Mirror said it was a miracle that none of the men involved was killed.
The Sun, Britain’s biggest-selling daily, paid tribute to the soldiers’ restraint, saying the temptation to lash out would have been huge. “Despite almost certain death, they refused to fire at their attackers.—AFP
