Halfway point of Basra tour

By Iolo ap Dafydd BBC Wales correspondent

The soldiers of the Royal Regiment of Wales (RRW) are halfway through their six-month tour of duty of Iraq.

The soldiers are carrying out regular patrols on the streets of Basra

The regiment, based in Germany, recruit almost exclusively from Wales and is currently based in Basra. Most of its work involves maintaining law and order by constant patrolling.

BBC correspondent Iolo ap Dafydd has spent a week with them and evaluates the situation in southern Iraq nine months since the war.

Dodging pedestrians and the number of road accidents that seem to clog junctions and packed thoroughfares of Basra is a hazard in itself.

Four hundred cars a day - driven from neighbouring Kuwait - have been pouring into southern Iraq.

It all points to a massive commercial re-awakening, but also to the growing chaos.

The soldiers are set to return home in three months

It seems strange a country with the second largest oil reserves in the world still has petrol shortages, but the 1.5m residents of Basra only have around a dozen petrol stations to satisfy the demand.

The end result is hours of frustrated queuing.

On the streets, the young soldiers of the RRW seem friendly and chatty with locals.

Some even have a grasp of Arabic and their attitudes and demeanour largely avoids the hostility shown to American soldiers as I saw on several occasions in Baghdad last year.

The US casualty list in central and northern Iraq grows every week.

So far morale of the Welsh and other 8,500 British soldiers in the south seems unaffected apart from the usual homesickness.

One RRW soldier died in a car accident on 6 November - if that increases, then several officers privately acknowledged it would affect morale.

The young soldiers of the RRW seem friendly and chatty with locals

But sometimes, the warm response to the Welsh soldiers is less friendly.

One notorious area is the deprived and neglected Shia Flats, which are home to some 300,000 Iraqis.

Here barefoot children play in raw sewage, and the stench of the open sewers and the piles of rubbish rotting in the open, is nauseating.

Soldiers are routinely pelted with stones by local children, and it is debatable whether the fledgling Iraqi police force will enforce law and order.

There are other potentially horrific humanitarian problems.

As a non-governmental organisation, the Danish De-mining Group are one group facing a huge task in clearing unexploded ordinances.

They also train Iraqis to clear mines - and deal with unexploded cluster bombs dropped by British and American planes during the war.

One RRW soldier died in a car accident last November

According to Peter Le Sueur, a leading authority on mine-clearing, the process will take many years.

Thousands of shells and ammunition - partly destroyed, litter acres of former agriculture land in massive arms dumps left unguarded.

Coalition forces will not help in these tasks, as they claim to have their hands full concentrating on keeping order in the more populated areas of Iraq.

According to Mr Le Sueur "an army of a million looters" scavenge these sites stealing copper, fuel, incendiary devices and shell charges, presumably to sell on the black market

The RRW are in Iraq for three more months.

But the Welsh presence within the British Army in Iraq, is set to last many more years yet.