IRAQ: When the squadron first saw the village of Gul Ashab no one knew that blood would be spilled. Triumph followed by tragedy only became the benchmark of Iraq's occupation later, writes Jack Fairweather.
Gul Ashab was just another collection of mud hovels and half-finished concrete houses, unremarkable except that it stood at the foot of Bridge One, one of five crossings into Basra from which the British were laying siege to the city.
"Strategically vital," claimed Maj Matthew Botsford, commander of A squadron Queens Dragoon Guards, although most of the men grumbled at having to forsake the more salubrious accommodation provided by one of Chemical Ali's palaces for a mudhole on the banks of the Shatt al-Basra.
"Well, least it's better than Bridgend," said Corporal Cain Thomas, from Cardiff, tucking in to his meat stew ration, but wisely not touching his inedible fruit dumplings and custard. Their strategic importance was to be revealed later.
The men and women of Gul Ashab soon made it clear which side they wanted to be on. Late at night villagers would come with marshland news: fedayeen movements, a tank in a school building in the next town, mortars hidden amid palm trees.
One day they even brought forth a Republican Guard sergeant who had been hiding in a chicken coop. One of the feared warriors who was holding up the American advance around the town of Nasuriya, this sergeant seemed anything but. He was short and unshaven and looking distinctly worried. He was carrying a hand-drawn map in his pocket, feared to be of British positions. But it turned out that the picture of trees surrounding a little house was one he'd sketched in captivity for his wife.
The next day we entered the village like kings. The entire village turned out to welcome us. They'd put on their party kit, the women in bright red and purple robes, the men in bright white disdashas. Beside the tanks, gangs of children ran. "Hello, mister," they shouted. This was what liberation was meant to feel like. In return the troops handed out rations - including the fruit dumplings and custard, sniffed at joyously by one man who hiked all the way from the neighbouring village.
"I don't think he knows quite what it contains," said Captain Rachel Thompson, attached to the unit. "It's not much, we know, but after they've been risking their necks to tell us where Iraqi tanks are located in the area the lads feel we owe them something."
The following night the village was mortared nine times. The villagers, no longer required to stay in their houses under British protection, were happily milling about outside.
The first two mortars struck a house, and then as the shooters adjusted their aim, they fell in succession on the street, the village square and a livestock pen beyond. A chunk of shrapnel had taken half the leg off one woman. The woman was also seven months' pregnant. There seemed little chance she would survive.
The squadron came under mortar attack a few hours later. "Time to pull out. Get a move on," shouted the major's driver.
I only discovered several days later that the injured woman had been taken out of the village. She kept her leg and the baby. But by then the price of liberating Iraq was clear enough.