KUWAIT, 27 March 2003 — Al-Jazeera television said yesterday there were no signs of unrest in the southern Iraqi city of Basra despite British reports that an uprising against President Saddam Hussein may have started there. Correspondents in Basra for Al-Jazeera and for Abu Dhabi Television reported yesterday they had seen no signs of unrest.
“The streets of Basra are very calm and there are no indications of violence or riots,” Jazeera’s Basra correspondent Muhammad Al-Abdallah told the Qatar-based network.
“There are no signs of the reported uprising. All we can hear are distant explosions in the southeast, and we believe fighting is going on there.” Jazeera is one of few international networks with a correspondent in Basra, Iraq’s second city where British forces on Tuesday attacked specific targets and captured a top official of Saddam’s Baath party. Reports of the uprising were also denied by Iraqi Information Minister Muhammad Said Al-Sahhaf in a statement to Al-Jazeera on Tuesday.
Later, British Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Peter Wall said there were indications a revolt might be under way in Basra, a Shiite stronghold. Reports of unrest first came from British reporters near the city, but these were denied by Iraq’s information minister. The people of Basra rose up against Saddam’s Sunni-dominated government after the 1991 Gulf War, but their revolt was crushed.
Britain’s defense minister said yesterday there had been disturbances in Basra, with residents “rising up” against Baghdad and Iraqi government militia attacking them. “Whether it is still happening remains unclear,” Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon told BBC radio in London. Arab television journalists inside Basra said they had seen no signs of unrest. But Hoon said: “Certainly there have been disturbances with local people rising up against the regime. We know that there have been attempts by regime militia to attack those people, their own people, to attack them with mortars, machine-gun fire, rifles and so on.”
Hoon said British forces stationed around Basra had not witnessed the uprising at first hand but had learned of it through “various sources”. Hoon’s comments went further than those of British officers whose forces are surrounding Iraq’s second biggest city as part of the US-led war on Saddam Hussein.
A British military spokesman at Central Command in Qatar, headquarters for the invasion force, said yesterday that British gunners had silenced Iraqi mortars in Basra that were believed to have been firing on residents. But the spokesman, Lt. Col. Ronnie McCourt, said the situation in Basra was “not quite clear”.
“We’ve had a number of different reports suggesting there has been some civil disturbance but we are waiting for a clearer picture to emerge before we can be certain of what is actually going on there,” he said.
“What I can say is that the artillery forces of the 7th Army Brigade, the Desert Rats, did engage enemy mortars who apparently were firing on the civil population,” McCourt said. “What’s the overall effect of the artillery unit we don’t know. We do know the mortars stopped firing.”
A television journalist with Britain’s ITN, Richard Gaisford, reported from just outside Basra on Tuesday that British forces had bombed the ruling Baath Party headquarters in the city, totally destroying it. But McCourt reaffirmed yesterday: “We’re not rushing in on (Basra) because we need to ascertain more precisely the conditions around the town.”
Later, an Iraqi Shiite opposition leader yesterday backed reports by British commanders that there had been up a civilian uprising in the main southern city of Basra, but said it affected only one working class neighborhood. “The uprising, which was limited to this neighborhood, took place after coalition forces bombed government positions,” Akram Hakim, an official of the Iran-based Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), told Al-Jazeera. He said the situation remained “explosive” yesterday morning in Basra.
A spokesman for the Tehran-based Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) said there were “some disturbances” in Basra. Asked if this amounted to an uprising, the spokesman, Abu Islam, said: “No, there is no uprising”. A SCIRI source said: “Some disturbances took place last night in different parts of Basra, but it was not widespread and it was not an intifada (uprising). The people chanted slogans against Saddam.”
