IRAQ: Prince Charles paid a surprise morale-boosting visit to British troops in Iraq yesterday, and spoke to local officials about their concerns over the country's future. He later flew on to Iran.
Amid heightened security, Prince Charles arrived on a Chinook helicopter at a British base that was one of Saddam Hussein's lavish palaces, shaking hands with soldiers and officials of the US-led civil administration.
During the nearly six-hour trip, he listened to prominent Iraqi officials discuss a wide range of political and economic problems plaguing postwar Iraq.
At one stage, gunshots rang out from a neighbourhood near the base in the southern port city of Basra, underscoring Iraq's precarious security situation.
"It's very nice to see him here because he's the future king and he seems like a nice personality to me," Ms Ban al-Durani, an Iraqi woman clad in a black veil, said at the base.
It was a rare visit by a British royal to the country that won independence from Britain in 1932. Prime Minister Tony Blair visited Basra last month.
News of the prince's visit was embargoed until he left the country.
"It's good to have his support and to boost the morale of the troops," Capt Sandy Stuart (31), from Dumfries in Scotland, said at the base.
Prince Charles, dressed in a grey suit, met Shia clerics, Christian clergymen, the governor of Basra and a prominent local leader in the palace overlooking the Shatt al-Arab waterway.
"I basically talked with him about people's complaints about salaries and how they are demonstrating," said local leader Mr Morahim al-Kannan.
"We told him that Iraq must have elections because otherwise there will be no stability. I told him we have no government and we have to have elections," Mr al-Kannan said.
Iraq's majority Shia Muslim community is demanding elections before a planned handover of power by June 30th. The US says elections cannot be held before then.
"We felt that he should know that our worries about the transfer of power in Iraq. There are still lots of problems in the country and that's what we told him," Sheikh Haitham al-Sihlaani, a prominent local cleric, said.
Prince Charles, an advocate of dialogue between religions, chatted with three Iraqi Muslim women in traditional veils in a room at the palace.
The prince, who is colonel-in-chief of the Royal Regiment of Wales and the Royal Parachute Regiment, met members of the Royal Regiment of Wales upon his arrived.
He later donned camouflaged parachute gear and flew by helicopter to meet members of the Royal Parachute Regiment.
Prince Charles also arrived in Iran yesterday, becoming the first member of the British royal family to visit the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution which toppled Iranian monarch Mohammad Reza Shah.
Prince Charleswill meet President Mohammad Khatami today, before travelling to the ancient south-eastern citadel city of Bam, struck by an earthquake on December 26th that killed more than 40,000 people.
British officials stressed that Prince Charles's visit to Iran was a purely humanitarian trip focused on Bam.