8 a.m. the next day. They were loading up and almost ready to go. The driver of our lorry had done the trip once already in the last few days. He was none too pleased about having to do it again. But thanks to him, we got our first real indication of what the situation was like on the ground in Al Amarah, in a shouted conversation over the noise of the engine as the convoy pulled out.
The Light Infantry had had two weeks of misery.
The main base in the city centre had been repeatedly surrounded by more than 3,000 demonstrators. It started as just an angry protest, but the mob — which was constantly chanting the name of Moqtada al-Sadr — had got increasingly violent. Blast bombs were now regularly coming over the base’s walls and armoured Warriors had to be deployed on the streets.
Over the last two nights, troops had also fought a series of clashes with Mehdi Army gunmen after coming under small arms fire.
Six British soldiers had been injured, and they had killed at least fifteen enemy in return. It was the worst violence British-controlled southern Iraq had seen since the end of the war.
And it showed no signs of abating at all.
3
Daz and I rode shotgun up country. It should have been a three-hour journey. Our convoy did it in five because the drivers got lost. That’s a hard thing to do, because it’s just one road.
We didn’t care. This was real Iraq.
With our SA80s in our laps, and a round in the chamber just in case, our legs dangled over the eight tonner’s back tailgate all the way up. It gave us a great view of the place that we were to call home for the next seven months.
For long periods of the journey we just sat in silence staring at the scenery, if you can call it that.
‘Fuck me. What a khazi,’ was Daz’s concerted opinion.
Most of Maysan is unpopulated wilderness. A dust-blown, heat-baked, flat and featureless wasteland. The Tigris River runs right the way through it, so it’s not desert. But it’s too hot and dry to be any good for farming more than a mile each side of the river.
It’s the poorest of all Iraq’s eighteen provinces — the true arse end of a truly arsed-up country. Maysan hates the rest of Iraq, which in turn hates it back. Nobody elsewhere gives a fuck about the place, and it couldn’t give a fuck about them either.
One of the reasons why it’s such a dump is the 280-kilometre border it shares with Iran. The province was the scene of a lot of the hideous trench warfare fighting between Saddam’s legions and Tehran’s during the 1980s. That not only destroyed what little industry there was in Maysan, but it also drove away most of its population for good.
Outside of its few towns, its only real landscape features are the hundreds of decaying tank and artillery berms built by both sides during war. Those, and the network of crumbling irrigation ditches that haven’t carried any water for decades.
Almost all of the houses we passed by were made out of mud walls. And what little farming we saw was totally untouched by any modern methods. At stages, it felt like we could have been driving through a land a thousand years back in time.
Not much has changed in Maysanis’ behaviour patterns from the dark ages either. Much of the province is semilawless. Its people are and always have been furiously independent. The only authority they have ever respected was tribal or religious. Extreme violence was just part of everyday life in Maysan. Human life had no great value.
On a piss stop, our lorry driver told us a story he had picked up off the Light Infantry.
A few weeks before, a dispute had broken out between two tribes over the ownership of a cow near a little town in the south of Maysan called Qalat Salih. They had settled it in the usual way. Both sides went home and got thoroughly tooled up. They met back in a field with all their heavy weaponry and opened up on each other. By the end of the day there were ten dead and forty wounded.
‘Mad fuckers or what, eh?’ the driver laughed.
‘Yeah, but what happened to the cow?’ Daz asked.
Nine miles short of Al Amarah itself, some 240 kilometres north of Basra, was Camp Abu Naji.
In Saddam’s day, it had been his 4th Corps’ massive headquarters — four square kilometres of barracks, training grounds and ammunition stores. Dozens of US and British bombing raids during both wars against Iraq had turned the camp into long eerie stretches of charred foundations and rubble. For all the tens of thousands of tonnes of ordnance the fly boys had dropped on it, they might as well have used a nuclear bomb. It wouldn’t have looked any different.
In the ensuing chaos, the camp had been heavily looted in the two days between the Iraqi army’s flight and the Paras turning up. Every home for miles around now had its own private arsenal, from AK47s to Dshke heavy machine guns, RPGs and mortars.
Only a few flat-roofed single-storey barracks blocks remained fully standing in the middle of this desert of rubble. So the Royal Engineers had built up a compound around them 800 metres long by 300 metres wide, by pushing up four great walls of earth four metres high and digging a deep defensive ditch all around them.
The previous battle groups’ command centres had occupied the hard buildings, and everyone else lived in rows and rows of giant air-conditioned tents. The PWRR did the same.
Abu Naji was far enough away from Al Amarah to prevent insurgents using it as cover to put effective mortar fire down on the camp. But that didn’t stop people trying.
As we were shown to our temporary digs, we passed the Light Infantry mortar teams digging themselves in for the night’s activities.
Right in the middle of the camp there was a makeshift football pitch, and smack in the middle of that they were digging three mortar pits. No more football there, then. We hadn’t even brought our mortar tubes. There were a few frantic phone calls back to the UK when the head shed arrived and remembered that. Last man out remember to pack the mortars.
Abu Naji had everything working soldiers needed inside it. A permanent cookhouse with three different hot meal choices per sitting, together with strawberry cheesecake and ice cream for pudding. To wash in, there were permanent, air-conditioned and tented shower blocks with hot and cold running water most of the day. And there was even a small R&R tent, rigged up with a dirty great satellite TV dish. But it was still very basic, and mind numbingly claustrophobic. You couldn’t leave the compound unless you were on official military business, and even that meant taking weapons, body armour and helmets with you. Shaibitha felt a very long way away.
I tracked down my oppo, the Light Infantry’s outgoing sniper platoon commander. I thought I might as well use the time before the rest of the platoon arrived to do the proper handover I promised Featherstone. It was a good job I did it then too. His name was Sid.
‘Hello mate, I’m Dan. I’m here for a couple of days, so if you’ve got time for a decent chinwag over a brew maybe…’
‘Yeah, pleased to meet you. Look I’m sorry, fella, we’ve got an hour and then I’m out of here on the next fucking bus. So what do you want to know?’
We sat down on the floor of his accommodation tent then and there. It wasn’t exactly the world’s longest handover. I tried to get as much out of him about the lie of the land as I could. We went over the maps of the city. In the last three or four weeks, he and his boys had been all over the place doing observation jobs on suspected ring leaders for all the crowd trouble. They had been run ragged.
As he heaved his Bergen over his back, Sid added: ‘I expect you’re going to have some fun in the next couple of weeks if it stays like this. I’ve got to dash or I’ll miss the plane. See you in another life.’ And off he went.
Abu Naji wasn’t to be our home. So as soon as the rest of the platoon caught up with Daz and me two days later, we would get straight into Al Amarah where Y Company was to be based.
And because it wasn’t our home, in true soldier’s fashion the boys started taking the piss out of the place the moment they arrived. Compared to the city where we’d hoped the real action would be, they’d decided it was just
