Living on edge, British troops fear more attacks

Still in soft hats and unarmoured vehicles, British troops patrolled the streets of Basra on Monday, their anxieties heightened by the killing of three military policemen. Although much of the southern Iraqi port city was calm, soldiers admitted to new fears following the ambush.

"Everybody's nervous now," said Corporal Warren Salisbury of the Que-en's Lancashire regiment as he carried out security checks on cars in the centre of Basra. "I'm nervous every time I go out. The attackers have upped it now, and we are conducting a lot more operations against them in return."

News of the attack on Saturday, and with it a new sense of vulnerability, spread within minutes to British serviceman throug-hout the region. "The news rippled out very quickly once it happened," said Cpl Salisbury, "and the effect spread just as fast."

Among those on patrol at the time of the attack was 21-year-old Pte Jason King, who is on his first operational tour of duty. "We were out on Saturday at the same time the troops were hit," he said. "When the news came across the radio it made me realise just how dangerous this place is. Now you just really watch your own back and your mates' backs all the time."

Increasingly edgy soldiers expressed their concerns about the soft-skin-ned civilian cars, known as "white fleet" vehicles, wh-ich have been rented by the army to make up for a shortfall of "green fleet" armoured land-rovers.

Though bullets ripped through the unarmoured Nissan driven by the victims of Saturday's attack, a British military spokesman in Basra said "white fleet" cars would still be used for "essential missions".

But soldiers manning the checkpoints around Basra dismissed the "white fleet" vehicles as "a waste of space". They claimed that the cars were favoured by senior officers only because they have air-conditioning. "Money would be better spent fitting air conditioning to the armoured equipment," a soldier said.

At British army headquarters at Basra's airport, officers are confident that troops are not yet facing an "established pattern" of attacks. For soldiers though, any attack in a city where they are on good terms with the vast majority of people comes as a shock.