Meet the next Saddam – minus the torture

Basra

No one’s elected him, he flourished as an army officer under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and by the strict standards set by Washington’s neoconservative ideologues for turning Iraq into a beacon of Western democracy, General Mohan al-Furayji, the Iraqi commander in charge of Basra, should have no role to play in the country’s reconstruction after decades of misrule.

Yet talk to anyone in Basra, whether Shia militiamen, Sunni tradesmen or British infantrymen, and all you hear is praise for the uncompromising way in which the new strongman of Basra has managed to impose something approaching order on a city that until recently was a byword for inter-factional Shia strife.

His rise to prominence began in the late summer when he was credited with negotiating a ceasefire between the warring Shia factions that were threatening to tip the city over the abyss into full-scale civil war. This in turn allowed British commanders charged with maintaining the peace in Basra to withdraw their beleaguered forces from the last remaining outpost at Saddam’s former palace on the banks of the Shatt al-Arab waterway.