Disagree with Sunray Minor. He states the majority of the Shia in the South would rather live under Sadr and his mob. Anyone asked the women?
So, a professional section of the population going about their business freely under Saddam's rule now have to wear the veil for their own safety? And we are happy to handover control to people who want to send the Iraqis back to the 12th Century? So much for selling the idea of democracy to the Iraqis.
Today's Guardian;
In 2004, the first signs of what would become inevitable became apparent.
On the hospital and university campuses these same armed groups were moving in, attempting to take over hospital wards and departments, and, when they succeeded, imposing their own religious and political views. In doing so they imposed a curiously Iraqi version of Iran's revolution back in the 1970s - religiously conservative but also violently anarchic.
What began with threatening posters, warning women what classes and clothes were appropriate for their status, has taken over the campuses. These days no one needs to tell the female students what behaviour is expected.
Professional women, professors and doctors would describe how their lives had become ever more grim. Those who had never worn a headscarf in their careers were now going veiled in the street, women students were being bullied and intimidated. All this in a city that was considered a relatively cosmopolitan outpost in Saddam's Iraq.
Other outspoken members of civil society learned to shut up or flee or risk the bullet - local journalists and judges, the heads of local NGOs. Where there was resistance to the creeping influence of the militia, hospital directors, administrators and staff were killed.
Although the British viewed what was happening as a messy little sideshow, something that would disappear as their attempts to impose democracy continued, it was the real and enduring story of Basra that only became more entrenched as the years went on.
With Shia resistance to the occupation gaining pace across Iraq, the political parties and their armed enforcers, starting in the holy cities of Kerbala and Najaf, engaged in a Shia political turf war which gradually transformed the city's politics. As the parties fought, and fractured, the fight for Basra and the south came to resemble a gangland war.
And in that war - as British generals acknowledged last year - British soldiers were caught in a crossfire where killing British troops was the quickest way for a faction to establish its militant credentials as anti-occupation and therefore deserving of political respect and authority. Soldiers based within Basra Palace, or employees of NGOs based nearby, would describe the constant barrage of mortars and rockets into the British positions.
What was at stake was not simply power, but cash. And not only cash derived from control of businesses by the militias, including petrol stations, car imports, cigarette smuggling, mobile phone shops and protection rackets. Also at stake was access to the suitcases of money being brought in across the Shatt al-Arab waterway from Iran to support the groups which had found sanctuary there in Saddam's time.
In the end it does not really matter what the British army and government say. Whether they say it was a victory or a defeat. What matters is how the militias perceive it. After today they will say that they chased the British out of Basra.