Shells rained down on Iraqi lines

THE light was failing when the shouting started, soldiers running for their vehicles, engines revving, a frantic scramble to move out. The word went from unit to unit - thousands of Iraqi militia had appeared in Basra and Az Zubayr and were pouring out of the city to take on the British troops laying siege at the bridges.

Among those supporting the forward units, there was consternation. Orders were given to get into convoy and get out. As they waited for the tanks to arrive to support the withdrawal, lights extinguished to reduce the threat it was clear they were now facing, a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) landed between the lead vehicles. It exploded with a deafening crash, but narrowly avoided the waiting troops.

Word was coming through that the man in charge of retaking Basra during Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran had been put in charge of the Iraqi resistance. The orders of Ali Hassan al-Majid al-Tikriti - nicknamed "Chemical Ali" because of his method of slaughtering many thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq - were to gather all the resources he could muster and retake the south.

But even as the British ammunition and fuel trucks prepared to pull back on Tuesday night, up ahead the forward units were fighting back. Tanks and Warriors, packed with infantrymen of the Black Watch, moved forward to engage and destroy the threat.

Artillery shells rained down on the Iraqi lines, the night sky ablaze with a white glow of phosphorous shells, fires springing up across the city. Shell after shell fell on the Iraqi positions, blowing apart tanks, artillery and mortar lines. Inside the city, there was pandemonium.

In the Shia stronghold of the city, the slums to the west near the British positions on the Shatt al-Basra canal, militiamen and security forces were executing anyone they believed was helping the British advance. In nearby Az Zubayr, militia men launched attack after attack on the surrounding British forces, hitting them with mortars, RPGs and rifle fire.

But even as they launched their last stand, ordinary citizens were rising up, turning on those who had turned on them. As British artillery pounded the area around the Baath party headquarters, those opposed to Saddam’s regime rose up and overwhelmed those inside.

The order went out that the forward units were to advance to support the civilian population. The majority wanted the militia out and if the majority was to have its way, it was time for the British to do what no-one did more than a decade earlier in the first Gulf war - to move in and help them rise up.

Rioting swept the streets, reports of spontaneous outbreaks of public disorder came in from across the city.

In the British forward observation post at the south side of the canal, they were taking heavy incoming artillery fire. Shells were landing all around the devastated transport depot overlooking the city.

But accurate though the Iraqi gunners were, their shells were failing to knock out the British position.

The support unit now safely out of artillery range, the British hit back again. With the rumble of thunder intermingling with the roar of the British guns and lightning flashing across the sky, they rained down high explosives, bomblets and phosphorous shells on the Iraqi positions which had only moments earlier been firing at them.

A mortar line that had been attacking B Company of the Black Watch was blown apart; two dozen pick-up trucks with machine guns mounted on their roofs were spotted and destroyed and dozens of T55 tanks smashed to pieces by the British bombardment.

Wherever the Iraq commander’s forces showed themselves, they were destroyed.

The fighting lasted all night, as torrential rain lashed . By first light, it was as good as over.

In the town of Az Zubayr, the militia men were on the run. Piling into mini-buses, they tried to flee, grabbing whatever they could lay their hands on. Pockets stuffed with hundreds of dollars, they headed north.

The first one got through, but there was no such luck for the others. Picked off at vehicle checkpoints, they found themselves driving straight into the sights of the British troops.

The men who had terrorised the civilian population, and subjected the advancing British troops to a campaign of harassment which had claimed at least two lives, were forced to squat by the roadside, hands on their heads, British guns pointed unswervingly at them.

As they waited helplessly to be carted away, the first military aid trucks were already racing past, RAF lorries towing huge water tankers and crates of emergency food supplies destined for Az Zubayr. Truck after truck went past .

By mid-morning, the International Red Cross, guarded by British troops, had restored half of Basra’s water supplies, even as fighting continued to mop up the pockets of organised resistance outside the city.

On the outskirts, support units were moving forward again through the fog that blanketed the countryside, gunfire still rattling around them, loud explosions reverberating across the flat and dusty landscape surrounding the beleaguered city of Basra and its one-and-a-half million population. By lunchtime, the forward British units were still in action, under fire from small arms and RPGs, but pushing forward relentlessly.

The first round of aid deliveries arrived at a makeshift distribution point just outside Az Zubayr as dusk fell. Immediately, a mortar round exploded 200 yards away, a flash of orange flame and a dull thump. Guns were firing too, in our direction.

The crowd scattered, the hands which a moment before had been pawing at the clothing of the soldiers snatched away. Suddenly, hundreds of people were fleeing across the open land back towards the heart of Az Zubayr.

Soldiers were everywhere, cocking their rifles, crouching by the roadside, trying to make out in the falling dusk where their attackers could be hiding.

Everyone was running, darting for cover behind Land Rovers and Warriors, desperate to get away from the danger that had shattered what should have been a moment of hope.

Guns at their sides, the soldiers looked for the shelter of the whitewashed walls of the low-lying dirty buildings at the sides of the aid distribution centre on the outskirts of the town. Moments before, excited Iraqi civilians had been smiling and laughing, swarming around the aid trucks which had finally made it into the town of 100,000 people, just 20km outside Basra.

Queuing chaotically behind lines marked out with white tape, they stood expectantly to receive their first fresh water and food for days.

"Thank you, thank you," they chorused, "America, Britain, good, good. Happy, happy."

Men were trying to kiss the soldiers, clutching their hands, tugging at their clothing, garbling their thanks, desperate for food, desperate for water.

Now the crowd was scattering, disappearing into the gloom, leaving the place where they had been deserted. The aid trucks were getting out as quickly as they came, soldiers were jumping into their vehicles and pulling away.

Tearing along the highway, throwing up clouds of dust in their wake, the drivers pressed their accelerators to the floor, determined to do as much as possible to put off the possibility of turning themselves into targets for a rocket-propelled grenade attack.

Through checkpoints, past more Warriors, more soldiers with guns, we bounced across the rutted road and through the mud, back towards safety. Through a desolate landscape, puddled with the rain that had fallen all night, past more clumps of prisoners under armed guard, past the dogs chasing and yapping at their tyres and tracks, the mood was so different from the expectation which had gone before.

Earlier, as the convoys moved along the dusty roads into the outskirts of the town to help dispense aid, groups of young boys had been playing football, oblivious to the columns of tanks and British troops pouring past them, oblivious to the sounds of shelling and gunfire rolling across the canal from Basra.

Everywhere, there were British tanks and armoured vehicles, their ochre paintwork battered and chipped.

The land was wreathed in a foggy haze, the sun shining through weakly, a pale white disc in the sky above.

Wrecked and abandoned vehicles were everywhere and on the edges of the fields, British troops clutched their rifles, scouring the countryside for signs of trouble.

Two armoured ambulances returned to a compound outside Basra, pockmarked with bullet holes from where the Iraqi gunmen had used the red crosses on their sides as targets. Two of the red crosses were pierced, the bullets close to the centre of each cross.

Their crews explained that they came under fire as they tried to help British troops whose vehicles had been hit in an RPG attack.

One vehicle was hit five times, one bullet piercing the side bin and burying itself in their water and rations, another in the exhaust box embedded in the left-hand arm of the red cross painted on the side. Two more hit just below the hatch where driver Corporal Mel Shepherd, 32, from Amble in Northumberland, had been sitting.

The final bullet embedded in the name William Lee, stencilled on the front of the vehicle, the name of Mel’s seven-month-old son. He said: "I just heard the cracks but didn’t realise what was happening. I didn’t know they were hitting us. My head was out of the hatch at the time and they struck just a foot away from my head.

"I could see tracer rounds coming at me. We only have personal small arms for ourselves and patient protection. I think that’s why they were having a go at us because we couldn’t hit back."

Vehicle Commander Sergeant Gary Moreland, 33, from Bedlington, Northumberland, said they had gone into Az Zubayr on a rescue mission: "We were going down the main street and a signal flare went up in the air. I remember going past a picture of Saddam Hussein and then there were bursts of gunfire behind me."

In the vehicle behind him Corporal Donald McClurg, 32, from Dumfries, heard a shout of "contact right".

He said: "I brought my weapon up and looked around to my right to see an RPG going straight past me, then another one went past. I put my head down then and used my periscope and told my driver Sarah to get her head down. We were under RPG fire going through the whole town."

His vehicle too had been struck, near the centre of its red cross. Another bullet had hit the name Rosie, the name he intends to give to his new baby when his wife gives birth, which is painted on the side of the vehicle and surrounded with painted flowers. She was due last Thursday, but he has not heard yet.

Driver Sarah Wilkinson, 19, from Derbyshire, said the first she knew of what was happening was the warning shot.

"I said to Don ‘look at that’ then an RPG went straight over the top of me. I was petrified; I didn’t have a chance to batten down the hatch, I just kept my head down."

Back on the edge of Az Zubayr, the army is refusing to give up the aid effort. Even as fresh explosions rolled across from the direction of Basra, they were heading back into the town. Half an hour after their hasty departure they were setting up again, this time with more armoured vehicles for support. The gunmen stayed away, but they are still out there.