British Find No Evidence Of Arms Traffic From Iran

Asked why he could declare himself so confident that no arms were coming through, Labouchere mildly cited his confidence in Iraq's border force.

Guards at one of the 27 border forts now used to guard Maysan were dismissive of talk of military support from Iran. "It's just fabrication," insisted one, Haidar Hassan.

At one crossroads checkpoint, two border guards grinned awkwardly when a British desert patrol stopped in. No smugglers had come by, no untoward travelers, no problems, the guards said. The guards, however, come from tribes with a history of smuggling, and since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi border workers have redoubled their reputation for taking bribes.

To determine the truth of the charges, British commanders say, the British troops did something no other large-scale conventional unit in the U.S.-led coalition here has tried. They gave up their base.

Almost every night for months, rockets and mortar rounds had pounded Abu Naji, the outpost where British forces made their home outside Amarah, Maysan's provincial capital. In the base's last five months of use, 281 rockets or mortar rounds hit Abu Naji, Labouchere said.

Young soldiers would slip out of base at night to try to find the attackers. They would return in the morning as frustrated as when they left, he said. "The boys felt they were powerless," Labouchere said.

So the British forces packed up. The night before they left, mortars gave Abu Naji a farewell pounding.

About 5,000 townspeople gathered at the gates of Abu Naji on Aug. 24. When British troops pulled out that afternoon, the mobs moved in. Iraqi forces briefly tried to hold back the crowds, then gave way, said Maj. Charlie Burbridge, a British military spokesman at Basra. The mobs looted the base down to the bricks.

"This is the first Iraqi city that has kicked out the occupier!" loudspeakers at the local offices of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr trumpeted.

In their new mission, the British spread out over a desert carpeted with shrapnel, the legacy of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war that claimed the bulk of its 1 million dead here in the deserts of Maysan. Pressing all hands into duty, a former tank crewman became a medic; the regiment chaplain took the wheel as a fuel tanker driver.

If trouble in most of Iraq had inevitably followed foreign soldiers, the soldiers in Maysan didn't seem to hear anything coming. Attackers had lobbed a rocket or mortar round at them during their first week in the desert, but there had been nothing since, they said.

At the least, Labouchere said, "I am satisfied our presence will reduce" the dangers for the rest of Iraq.

Ultimately, however, the British can do little more than demonstrate that the borders are closed, Labouchere said. Save for that, he said, they find themselves trying "to prove a negative."