LONDON: The British government has nearly doubled its estimate of the cost of military operations in Iraq, according to figures revealed by Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown on Monday.

The chancellor has now agreed to set aside more than £5.5bn to pay for the operations. At the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, ministers allocated £3bn to cover what they called “the full costs of the UK’s military obligations” there. Mr Brown has now made clear that this sum was a huge underestimate.

The latest figures also suggest that the annual costs of Britain’s military presence in Iraq are increasing. Mr Brown said that an extra £580m would be allocated to the special reserve for “Iraq, Afghanistan and the government’s other international obligations.”

This is more than the extra money Mr Brown put in the special reserve last year, and it brings the total provided for the fund to £5.64bn.

Figures obtained by the Iraq Analysis Group, an independent research organisation, show that the vast bulk of the special reserve is spent on British military operations in Iraq, although the government does not specify exactly how the money is allocated. So far, at least £3.2bn has been spent on British military operations in southern Iraq, with a further £1.7bn already allocated for them, the figures show. Liam Wren-Lewis, a member of the Iraq Analysis Group, said. “This latest provision continues a steadily increasing trend in the cost of the Iraq war to UK taxpayers.”

The Ministry of Defence was unable to provide figures last night for the cost of its military operations in Iraq. However, in a note to his cabinet colleagues last summer, John Reid, the defence secretary, said that the cost amounted to about £1bn a year.

That was one reason, he suggested, why he wanted to cut the number of British troops in Iraq. A reduction to about 3,000 troops — from the present 8,500 — by the middle of next year should halve that sum, he said. The chancellor also announced that an extra £135m would be allocated for security and counter-terrorism measures. Some of this is likely to be spent on increased staff and technology for MI5. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service