The two undercover soldiers –members of the special forces (SAS)- were arrested by Iraqi troops after they failed to stop at a military checkpoint. "A policeman approached them and then one of these guys fired at him killing him. Then the police managed to capture them," The Guardian said. Next, they were taken to the main police station of the city.

Provocateur agents

Both soldiers were provocateur agents. They were disguised as Arabs and were armed with machine guns and explosives at the time of their arrest. The Arab television network al-Jazeera showed the contents of the car used by the two SAS men, including assault rifles and anti-tank weapons. The Shiite deputy Fatah al Sheij, member of Muqtada al Sadr´s organization, claimed that "the two British were wearing Arab clothes and were going to fire at people who were congregating at a Shiite sanctuary in the city" in order to blame Al Sadr´s movement for these facts. Most Iraqis suspect that American and British occupiers want to provoke interreligious and interethnic clashes in order to rule Iraq more easily and justify their presence and they are behind many of the bloodiest terrorist attacks taking place in the country.

 A British soldier engulfed by flames while leaping from a tank

The British attack on the prison was condemned as "barbaric, savage and irresponsible" by the governor of Basra, Mohammad Al-Waili. Shortly after the British operation, Al Sadr´s supporters attacked a British tank and some armoured vehicles with petrol bombs, leaving three British soldiers injured. A soldier was seen scrambling from the burning tank and escaping a rock-throwing mob.

These facts have prompted many British politicians to renew pressure on Tony Blair to withdraw 8,500 British troops from Iraq. These politicians fear the country will be sucked into a Vietnam-style conflict, according to The Independent. Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, Sir Menzies Campbell, told the British daily: "If these events reflect a breakdown in the relationship between the Iraqi civilian authorities in Basra and the British military, then they are very worrying indeed. These events underline the need for a coherent exit strategy of British forces from Iraq."

The former international development secretary Clare Short, who resigned in protest over the war, also told The Independent: "We should negotiate an end to the occupation. They (the government) are all saying "no" because it is such a mess we cannot leave immediately. But the occupation is a problem now. The Association of Muslim Scholars has said that they would negotiate and call an end to the resistance if we set a date for a withdrawal. Unless we withdraw, it is going to get worse."

Alan Simpson, of the left-wing Campaign Group of Labour MPs, adds: "The message is this: it is the time to go. It is a horrible mess, worse than Northern Ireland because no one pretends that this is our country. When you get army personnel dressed as Arabs armed with automatic weapons and explosives, everyone will see this as the role of agent provocateurs. It has just ripped our credibility into tatters. Tony Blair should bring an end to this chaos."

"The British do not like to leave before they can say they have done the job," Lord Timothy Garden of the Chatham House Foreign Policy Institute said, for his part, to AFP. "The trouble is, nobody quite knows what the job is anymore." Some analysts fear that a prolonged British presence will sow greater resentment among Iraqis and will make them believe that they are under a colonialist-type occupation, and it will trigger more deadly attacks against British forces.

Some weapons confiscated from the two British commandos

In fact, images of a British soldier engulfed by flames while leaping from a tank attacked by a crowd in Basra punctured notions that British forces are safer in Iraq than their US counterparts. 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. Now we know different," the editorial stated. On 5^th September, two British soldiers were killed by an explosion in Basra province, while they were travelling in an armoured Land Rover. The deaths took the number of British military casualties in Iraq to 94, according to the Ministry of Defence figures.

Iraqi reaction

The office of the Iraqi Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, criticized the British attack against the prison in Basra as "a very unfortunate development". Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie also criticized the British raid as "a violation of Iraqi sovereignty." The Iraqi government has already announced that it will launch an inquiry into the incident. For his part, an Iraqi judge in Basra issued an arrest warrant on 24^th September for two British soldiers for killing an Iraqi policeman. "The investigative judge in Basra issued an arrest warrant against the two British terrorists on charges of opening fire on two policemen, killing one and wounding the other, carrying unlicensed weapons and holding false identification," Mohammed Saadum Al-Ebaidi, head of the Basra provincial council, told AFP. However, London immediately rejected the measure by alleging that its troops are immune from prosecution under Iraqi law. "All British troops in Iraq are under the jurisdiction of Britain," a Defence spokesman said in London.

The whereabouts of the two soldiers is now unknown to Iraqi authorities. Since the attack against the prison British troops have confined themselves to their barracks in and around Basra, lowering their profile in an effort to dampen down tensions.

The 41-member provincial council which rules Basra and the city´s governor, Mohammed al Waili, said they would end all cooperation with British forces in the city until Britain apologizes for the use of force. Nadhim al-Jabiri, the spokesman for the provincial governor in Basra, claimed that "all regular meetings between the governorate and British troops have been cancelled and we will not allow British soldiers into the governorate building or any other public office in Basra." The Council also said it would punish employees who did not try to defend the Basra police station from the British attack.

Iraqi sources said that such an operation could not have been launched without the authorization of the top echelons of the British government, including the Prime Ministers Office. Some Iraqis believe that the British government was afraid of the information that the two British commanders could have given to the Iraqis about the secret terrorist operations that the US and British intelligence agencies are carrying out in Iraq and it would have ordered to launch the attack despite the political cost that it was going to have in the relationship with the Iraqis.

For their part, hundreds of Iraqis, some of them police officers in uniform, demonstrated in the streets of the city against the British military presence in Basra and called for the two British agents to face Iraqi justice. "We condemn the illegal acts of British troops," read a banner as demonstrators chanted: "No, no to the occupiers." They also demanded the resignation of the provincial police chief, accusing him of being an agent of the British.