Browne: Iraqis must tackle violence themselves
The defence secretary has repeated his insistence that British troops will not pull out of Iraq ‘until the job is done’, after two more soldiers were killed at the weekend.
The pair, who are from the Queen’s Dragoon Guards, were killed by a roadside bomb in the southern city of Basra on Sunday morning. Their deaths take the number of British soldiers killed in Iraq since March 2003 to 113.
Yesterday, two British broadcast journalists, Paul Douglas and James Brolan, were killed while filming in Baghdad, which took the journalist death toll to 71. The presenter they were working with, Kimberley Dozier, was seriously injured in the attack.
The deaths of the four Britons and the continuing violence, which sees about 1,000 Iraqis killed every month according to some reports, are adding to pressure on the new Iraqi government to appoint ministers to the two key posts of interior and defence.
Prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has promised to clamp down on the insurgency, but many are sceptical that any progress can be made while those positions remain vacant.
Speaking this morning, British defence secretary Des Browne said the violence needed to be tackled “by the Iraqis themselves”, telling Today: “The militias and the other sectarian behaviour can be neutralised.
“That can be done not only by developing the Iraqi security forces but in some circumstances appropriately offering those people who carry arms the opportunity to be integrated into the Iraqi security forces.”
He said the violence was caused in part by insurgents wishing to overthrow the new government, but also by criminals taking advantage of the unstable situation.
“In the Basra area, substantially, there is competition for wealth and power taking advantage of the fact there was a hiatus between [last December’s national] election and the formation of the government,” Mr Browne said.
But although he welcomed the formation of the national unity government, which includes representatives of all three main groups in Iraq, the Sunnis, Shias and Kurds, he stressed that it was not yet the right time for Britain to pull its 7,200 troops out of Iraq.
“We have proposed that we will continue to remain in Iraq until the Iraqi government is confident that the Iraqi security forces are capable of providing security without assistance from the coalition forces,” the defence secretary said.
“The decision on withdrawal will be based on achieving the right conditions, but not on a particular timetable. It wouldn’t be in the Iraqi people’s interests for us to impose some timetable or some arbitrary measure of when the security will be right or the circumstances will be right.”
