Snapshot of life for UK troops in Basra - BBC

The BBC's diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams has been embedded with the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment in Basra.

The regiment has been involved in training and mentoring the Iraqi army, before the final departure of British troops on 31 July.

Click here to watch a BBC video report as three soldiers show us around the base and explain what they hope to achieve in the country.

High hopes for peaceful elections - BBC

By Paul Adams

In the fifth instalment of his week-long diary, BBC diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams discovers high hopes that the elections will go ahead peacefully.

After a week of unbroken sunshine, the clouds gather and it rains. It patters hard on the canvas covering the makeshift solar showers and forms wide puddles around the Mastiff armoured vehicles parked outside. It is cold.

With Saturday's provincial elections taking place, the men of Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment are pretty much confined to barracks. They already keep a low profile in the city, but will be invisible on polling day. Nothing must be allowed to alter the impression that this is an entirely Iraqi affair.

The men are briefed on events in the city. Their area of operations includes numerous polling stations. The Iraqi army is deployed in strength around the city, securing the outer perimeters of polling stations, and no-one here seems to think there will be trouble.

But with a couple of hundred British soldiers still based in the city, and 4,000 stationed nearby, they will respond if the Iraqis ask for help.

Given that the successful holding of provincial elections is one of the conditions the British government has set for the final withdrawal of its troops from Iraq, everyone hopes the day will pass off peacefully.

The men of 1 PWRR are told what will happen if they are called out. A map is displayed here in their base, showing the locations of polling stations.

But everyone is relaxed and most spend the day attending to chores and studying. An education officer is visiting for a few days and she has got the men's noses in their books.

They are not under any obligation to study, but they know that promotion depends on reaching certain educational standards. For many young men who left school early, it is an opportunity to make up for lost time.

Fred and I prepare video material for tomorrow's election coverage and send it over via satellite. It takes hours. Late in the evening we are told by London that something has gone wrong and it all has to be sent again. Glamorous lifestyle, this.

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Basra aiming to turn the corner - BBC

By Paul Adams

In the fourth instalment of his week-long diary, BBC diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams meets the people preparing for the weekend's elections.

Another chance to see the British mentors in action this morning as we visit an Iraqi army battalion headquarters downtown. The 1-50 are housed in a building that should have been a hotel but was never finished.

It is in a sorry state, roof tiles sagging, broken windows, whole rooms upstairs full of rubbish. The water in the swimming pool is an evil shade of green.

But Sgt Maj Jim Leech is not interested in niceties. He wants to know how the base is organised. He casts an experienced soldier's eye over the storeroom and clinic and makes suggestions on how things can be done better. He is unfailingly polite and never remotely patronising.

In a one-time bathroom, grenade launchers are piled in a wooden box. But the gun racks are clean and labelled - everything is checked in and out. Sgt Maj Leech seems satisfied.

Truck loads of 1-50 soldiers are loading sleeping bags and personal kit onto their jeeps. They are off to guard the outer perimeters of polling stations across the city, ahead of Saturday's important provincial elections.

'Critical point'

We drive off, along streets smothered in campaign posters, to a meeting with Hatem el-Bachary, who is heading an independent list and hoping to pick up a few of the 35 seats up for grabs in Basra.

A genial businessman, with company offices in Bradford, he says it is time to invest in the city's future because people are disappointed with what Iraq's politicians have achieved so far.

"This is a very critical point in the democracy of Iraq," he tells me. "They have already wasted five or six years."

Hatem looks out over a fetid canal that runs beside his park and says he dreams of turning Iraq's second largest city into something people can be proud of. He speaks with real passion, but the task is daunting. The city does not seem to have changed much in appearance since I first came here in late 2003.

This evening, we drive into the teeming heart of the city, into streets that have come alive. A year ago, with the city held hostage by fundamentalist militias, Basra was dead after dark. But the government took on the militias and now, despite Basra's myriad problems, the city seems to have turned a corner - for the time being at least.

Hatem is out campaigning. His young team have set up a projector on a corner of broken kerb stones, and a small crowd of curious onlookers is blocking the traffic.

For a man with big ambitions, it is an embarrassing affair. There are endless problems with the projector and the sound, and the screen keeps being blown over in the breeze. Hatem does not seem in the least bit fazed and says it is important for politicians to be out on the street, meeting real people.

It is hard to see how he can break the power of the larger parties in Basra, but he is full of optimism. We leave as the sound system is finally fixed and his campaign song - which seems to consist mainly of his name, repeated over and over - blends with the car horns and bustle of night time Basra.

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UK troops in Iraq ponder legacy - BBC

In a cavernous single room, with a grubby tiled floor and two rows of imposing columns, 50 British soldiers eat, sleep and go about their duties.

Outside, four vast Mastiff armoured vehicles and a sand-filled blast barrier guard the entry.

The British are here as guests of the Iraqi army - the rest of the old navy base, close to the Shatt al-Arab waterway, is home to 50 Brigade - but the basic habits of security are deeply ingrained.

The British have had their ups and downs here in Basra, but since law and order was restored to the city after fierce fighting between the Iraqi army and local militiamen last spring, life has been less eventful.

The bulk of the British contingent, about 4,000 troops, are out at the city's airport, well out of view of the local population.

But about 200 are still in the city, embedded with Iraqi army units in low-profile "MiTTs" (Military Transition Teams). Their job is to mentor and advise the army as it learns to stand on its own two feet.

Another 650 British soldiers are working in MiTTs outside the city.

'Big task'

The teams are tiny - most of the 50 camped out at the naval base are there for force protection - and they are measuring the progress of their Iraqi counterparts according to a country-wide set of standards - an Operational Readiness Assessment - set by the US-led coalition in Baghdad.

The British say they are impressed with the mounting confidence of the Basra-based 14th Division, and this week they were pleasantly surprised to see large-scale search operations conducted in the lawless town of Az-Zubeir.

But there is still some way to go, which is hardly surprising for an army defeated, disbanded and then reconstituted from scratch by an invader-turned-ally.

"They've developed some kind of dependency on us," says Maj Adrian Grinonneau, from the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment.

"We've got to wean them off that in a very short space of time and that's a big task."

But as the date for the departure approaches, there is another problem.

When the last British soldiers leave Iraq, on or before 31 July, many will wonder what their true legacy is.

Knocking an Iraqi army division into shape is no mean achievement, but is it enough?

Gordon Brown, never this war's greatest proponent, set a limited set of goals last summer - complete the training and mentoring of the 14th Division, hand over Basra airport to civilian control, set the environment for successful provincial elections and help to boost investment. Then leave.

The airport is now in Iraqi hands and work with 14th Division is almost complete.

Elections are imminent and the Foreign Office in London says investment worth £9bn is in the pipeline although Basra's filthy streets and open sewers suggest the results may take some time to materialise.

But as the British withdrawal from Iraq begins - some equipment has already been driven out to Kuwait - the Americans are moving in.

They have had small mentoring teams in the city since last August, working with the police, and they will soon take over command of the Basra air station.

To sceptical eyes, it feeds the notion that we are quitting early, leaving the Americans to finish the job.

When I joined an American police mentoring team on patrol through a quiet neighbourhood of Basra Lt Aaron Webb of the 21st Military Police Company said the impression was false, but added: "We're just coming down here to continue on what the British forces have been doing for the last few years."

As the Union Jack disappears and the Stars and Stripes is run up the flagpole, British commanders know the images will appear to tell their own story.

But they insist their own specific tasks are complete and they can leave with honour intact.

The British divisional commander Maj Gen Andy Salmon says his own men tell him it has been worth it.

"They really feel satisfied about being able to look back and say despite the ups and downs and some really difficult periods we're in a really good place."

The British soldiers at Basra's old naval base will be glad to leave their spartan conditions behind and know they will not be around much longer.

Some of them wonder how their work here will be judged.

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Troop draw down crucial for Army

Analysis
By Caroline Wyatt
Defence correspondent, BBC News

During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, 46,000 British personnel were engaged in the operation.

That number is now down to 4,100 and could decrease even further next year, according to the prime minister.

Gordon Brown's words "a fundamental change of mission" mean a dramatic scaling down of Britain's troops in southern Iraq from early next year.

It may not be a complete withdrawal, but more than five years since the invasion, it is at last looking possible that British troops could leave Basra - and leave behind them a functioning place.

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