British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw today made a personal pledge to the comrades of the six Royal Military Police killed in Iraq that Britain would not give up the hunt for their killers.
Mr Straw, on a whistle stop visit to Baghdad and Basra to assess for himself the security situation in the country, said that the number of British troops in Iraq was being kept under "very constant review".
And he promised that reinforcements would be sent if they were needed. "The level of the troops by the UK and the US is obviously kept under constant review," he told a news conference at the British embassy in Baghdad.
"We are committed to ensuring that there are sufficient British troops to do the job that is necessary." Earlier in the day, he had visited the British headquarters in Basra for talks with the commander of the First Armoured Division, Major General Sir Peter Wall.
He also met some of the colleagues of the six dead military police as well as members of the First Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, who were caught up in the incidents last week in the village of Al Majar al-Kabir.
He said that he had reaffirmed to them the pledge to track down the killers, however long it took. "I gave a personal undertaking to some of the comrades of the military police to do just that," he said.
"It is going to take as long as it is going to take." Mr Straw said that despite the incident at Al Majar al-kabir and a number of recent attacks on US forces around Baghdad, the security situation was improving.
He acknowledged, however, that there were elements of the Baath and the Fedayeen still operating "in a relatively well-organised way" against coalition forces.
British Prime Minister Mr Mr Tony Blair's personal envoy in Baghdad, Mr John Sawers, said that a recent spate of sabotage attacks had followed a crackdown by the Americans in Faluja and Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's old hometown and a hotbed of resistance.
Mr Sawers said that it suggested they were having to turn from "hard targets to soft targets" because of the successful operations by the coalition forces. Nevertheless, the precarious security situation dominated the arrangements for the visit by Mr Straw - the most senior British politician to travel to the Iraqi capital.
After he was flown into Baghdad International Airport in a BAE 140 light passenger jet from the RAF's Royal Squadron, he was immediately whisked away in a flight of three US Blackhawk helicopters because the road into the city was judged too dangerous for travel by car.
PA