[ 20 March 2003 ] On 20 March 2003, Britain joined the United States in an illegal military assault on Iraq in order to enforce regime change and eliminate the country’s alleged ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ even though London was aware that there was no credible evidence for their existence. As the chief UN weapons…
8 May 2003 On 8 May 2003, soldiers of the Black Watch regiment, searching for a suspect looter with convictions for murder and rape, raided a house in Basra. They were frustrated to find only his father, taxi driver Radhi Nama, along with his two daughters and three grandchildren. According to his daughter Afif, when…
30 November 1923 On 30 November 1923, forty aircraft from five R.A.F. squadrons began round the clock bombing sorties against two villages near the town of Samawah in southern Iraq. The air strikes continued for two days, resulting in the almost total destruction of the villages and a death toll officially estimated at 144 men,…
3 November 1918 on 3 November 1918, four days after an armistice with Germany’s First World War ally Turkey had brought to an end hostilities in the Middle East, the British army in Mesopotamia, acting under direct orders from Prime Minister Lloyd George, seized the town of Mosul in what is today northern Iraq. British…
24 October 1927 At 0500 hours on 24 October 1927, at Shattrah RAF base, outside Al-Nasiriyah in southern Iraq, a notice was erected for pilots with a short message – ‘Carry on Bombing !’ The target was the villages of the Al Hatim tribe, which had already endured two days of bombing. The inhabitants had…
24 September 2002 At 8 am on 24 September 2002, only thirty minutes prior to the deadline for the headline in the Evening Standard‘s first edition, Charles Reiss, the paper’s political editor, was allowed to see the government’s intelligence dossier on Iraq’s supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). After reading about Iraq’s ‘strategic missile systems’ and its…
15 September 2003 On 15 September 2003, Baha Mousa, a hotel receptionist, was kicked, beaten and tortured to death by British troops in the Iraqi city of Basra. He was one of a group of ten innocent civilians, who were subjected to appalling brutality. Their agony was witnessed by other soldiers, a medic, officers and…
20 August 1920 On 20 August 1920, Major General George A.J. Leslie, commanding the 17th Indian Division in Iraq, wrote to his wife Edith in India, informing her that Brigadier General H.A. Walker’s column, comprising two British and six Indian battalions was ‘slowly working its way back here ravaging the country on its way,’ while…
31 July 2005 On 31 July 2005, Stephen Vincent, a journalist embedded with UK forces, wrote a damning article in the New York Times, entitled ‘Switched Off in Basra,’ alleging that the police in southern Iraq’s main city were comprised mostly of bloodthirsty fundamentalist armed militias in uniform, who were being equipped and supported by the British. …
23 July 2002 On returning from Washington on 23 July 2002, the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, was summoned by Tony Blair to join a hastily arranged meeting in the Prime Minister’s office. Also present were Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, Attorney General Peter Goldsmith, Cabinet Secretary Richard Wilson, Chief of…
