British Casualties in April

Earlier this month, I wrote that something strange may be going on in the British area of operation due to the increased number of combat related fatalities. If we excluded one outlier, when an RAF Hercules was shot down with ten combat fatalities in January, 2005, the worst month for British combat deaths were several months with six fatalities. April 2007 was one of those months. The maximum number of fatal incidents has been three fatal combat incidents.

The Ministry of Defense has just announced two more combat deaths from a single IED blast in Maysan Province. With April only 60% complete, this month already has the second most combat deaths, and the most combat death incidents. Maysan is north of Basra, and it is an area that Sadrist guerrillas have successfully forced the British out of the capital city of Amarrah last summer, and the remaining British forces in the province are light cavalry units trying to patrol the Iraq-Iran border. These units have seen minimal arms smuggling activity in the past nine months.

John Robb at Global Guerrillas is passing along an interesting breakdown of the various Sadrist factions and splinter groups written by Babak Rahimi:

• Mahdistic (Najaf and Basra). Target: the increasingly irrelevant Shiite establishment in Najaf and the Iraqi government.
• Sectarian militias (primarily in Sadr City) Target: Sunni groups and the US military.
• Regional militias. Specifically, the remnants of Sadr's militia and the Fadhila party (an off-shoot of Sadrist movement) in a contest for control of Basra and the Southern oil company.

The regional militias are splintering and looking out for their own self-interest while also jostling with each other for power. The British are just another, very heavily armed, militia in this power struggle. And they are trying to sit on the smuggling routes, and other sources of revenue, so they are targets for some of the militias.