Today’s hearing from the Iraq inquiry focuses on the consequences of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s 2008 Operation Charge of the Knights, which targeted the militias and criminal gangs of Basra
When Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched Operation Saulat al-Fursan, or Charge of the Knights, on the morning of 25 March 2008 it was not just the militias and criminal gangs of Basra that were taken by surprise.
As we heard yesterday even US and UK top brass in Iraq got only a couple of days’ notice of the surge, and initially at least Washington and London had little idea how Knights would affect their joint strategy. (In the event it delayed UK troop withdrawal until mid-09, as soldiers were kept in Iraq to work alongside the Iraqi forces as military transition teams – the “embedded Mittings” Lyne joked about in Wednesday’s session.)
Although in retrospect the coalition says it viewed Knights as a comparative success – an empowered Maliki exercising his own national defence policy independent of occupation forces – the outcome was far from guaranteed.
Hundreds of Iraqi Army soldiers deserted and – avid inquiry followers may not be surprised to hear – many Iraqi police officers followed likewise, some at the orders of the militia itself. (There’s a decent analysis of the Knights campaign, and the difficulties it ran into, at this US military analysis think tank The Institute for the Study of War)
So it’s against that background that the inquiry takes evidence today from three witnesses; Lt-Gen Barney White Spunner (who was i/c multinational forces in the south east at the time) on the operation itself, and Nigel Haywood (consul general of Basra) and Keith MacKiggan (a DfID secondee who headed up provisional reconstruction).