Basra: Where life is upside down

By Kate Adie Basra

Walking down a rubbish-strewn pavement was a foxy-faced young man clutching a five-foot-high brass chandelier; bits of it dangled and twinkled all too obviously in the drab street of boarded-up shops and shabby traders' stalls of central Basra.

There has been widespread looting in Basra

"Don't tell me," said the sunburnt soldier, signalling to his mates on patrol over the road. "Got it from me uncle."

He casually beckoned towards the swaying chandelier, and began an informal interrogation which involved a lot of pointing and indeed, many mentions of the house of "my uncle".

The chandelier was eventually prised from its temporary owner and added to a heap of curious loot: aluminium piping, half a hi-fi set and most, but not all, of a lavatory.

The looter got a yelling-at, not a word of which he presumably understood, but the meaning was in the bellowing.

He sloped off in his flapping, worn slippers and torn t-shirt, not having put up much of an argument.

Around the corner, earlier, there has been a much noisier scene of furniture removal, with an army patrol laying into a number of local lads who had broken into a house for the third time.

Fists and boots and foul language flew. Loot clattered and smashed.

The neighbours looked on indifferently, with that carefulness born of years of self-preservation under a nasty regime. Some glanced at their own plastic bags carrying a few oranges and some fat onions, and took a tighter hold on them.

'Saddam lives'

If you are 18 years old, having fought your way into a strange town where you do not speak the language, the temperature is over the 100F mark, and the flies travel collectively like magic carpets, you are probably not wholly aware of your impact on local people.

The children have to rub shoulders with the British troops

They have just been through bombs and shelling, tanks have growled past the high-walled gardens of substantial villas and rubbish-strewn alleys, and huge armoured vehicles are parked awkwardly in the grounds of the hospitals.

Life has gone upside down, and there is no way of knowing if the man who ran it is gone for good: "Saddam lives," snigger the gangs of children pestering the foreigners.

Their parents' generation offers no opinion; it is too early to speculate about the future.

Instead, they have to rub shoulders with the foreigners, who have taken up residence in the enormous palace complex built by Saddam Hussein on the banks of the River Tigris - all marble and intricate carving and incomplete bathroom fittings.

Invaders or liberators?

The foreigners are in charge; and they are British with a long history of involvement with Iraq. The war memorials and cemeteries with British imperial echoes are numerous in the area.

They appear to patrol and sort out the odd rumpus with a great deal of ease and the occasional boot, thanks to years of practice in Bosnia and Belfast.

They play football with the teenagers who scream "Manunited, Manunited" at every goal; they say "cheers" and "hi" to elderly men who reply with the well-modulated "Good morning to you," of the older, sophisticated Iraq.

They are the new invaders - or the liberators; it is in the balance.

The troops have made the presidential palace their home

In the hot evenings, the soldiers in their camp consume can after can of fizzy drinks; the Iraqis take sips from glasses of tea in the crumbling old quarter and tell me the invaders will not be tolerated for long.

My interpreter, an eager energetic soul longing for a real job in a real economy, produces sheaves of paper showing his uncle's engineering certificates from Rolls Royce in Derby, and his own qualifications as an IT consultant.

"Why should we have our future decided by others?" he asks.

The diminutive head of the cancer unit at the main hospital - with fond memories of the Brompton Hospital in London - has no desire to see American business take over his health service: please go home, he says politely.

They listen in alarm to the news of demonstrators in northern towns quelled by coalition gunfire.

They gossip about the less honourable moments that are emerging from the fog of war: the prisoner-of-war camp where a food riot was put down by the Americans with bullets - with two bodies left among the spilt bowls; the border town where a US unit was seen to hammer machine-gun fire repeatedly at civilians; the widespread use of depleted uranium in weapons.

There's no way of knowing if Saddam Hussein has gone for good

The stories circulate, and resentments fester.

To be liberators, there has to be honour and respect and a plan for the future.

It is a lot to ask of 18-year-old soldiers who have a very basic grasp of Islamic religious factions and Mesopotamian social structure - and who just want to know how long they are going to stay in southern Iraq - and why they should stay.

It is a lot to ask of those who have just emerged from a dictatorship, who have a very basic grasp of what is being plotted in the faraway White House, but who long for the foreigners to leave.

Meanwhile, the patrols continue, and no-one has arrived yet to claim the hideous chandelier.