Meet the next Saddam minus the torture

Con Coughlin talks to General Mohan al-Furayji, the Iraqi commander in charge of Basra, a tough man who has already helped to contain violence in the south 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 neoconservafive 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.

Even if this tactical redeployment had been under review for some months (it was originally planned for April, but delayed at the request of the Americans who were concerned it would send the wrong message), it was General Mohan, in the eyes of local Iraqis at least, who took all the credit.

Immediately after the British vacated the palace, Mohan took centre-stage, declaring, 'I have one goal, to bring security to Basra province.' Since then he has been as good as his word, presiding over a 70 per cent decrease in the city's murder rate in just a month.

Nor has Mohan been shy about declaring his nationalist credentials to his admiring Iraqi public. Taking his cue from General Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff who last year warned that the continued presence of British troops in Basra could exacerbate the security situation, Mohan not only predicted that the level of violence would fall dramatically the moment the British withdrew to the less visible confines of the air base on the city outskirts, but he publicly castigated his British overseers for not doing more to rebuild the country's infrastructure and deal with the unemployment crisis.

Mohan's abrasive style and fierce patriotism has inevitably drawn comparisons with the last Iraqi leader who was successful in subduing the Shia of southern Iraq — Saddam Hussein. But unlike the deposed dictator, Mohan is prepared to work with the West, not against it.

If only, it is tempting to think, people like Mohan had been allowed in the immediate aftermath of Saddam's overthrow to lend a hand tackling the country's lawlessness and impose order. There were very few Iraqis who were sad to see the back of Saddam, and giving the post-Saddam administration of the country an Iraqi complexion may well have helped to avoid the carnage of the past four years.

But that did not suit the neocon agenda, which actively sought the complete destruction of anything associated with the country's Baathist infrastructure, and the physical destruction of the country's government was accompanied by Paul Bremer's disastrous deBaathification programme.

Just how Mohan has slipped through the net to emerge as the new strongman of Basra is something of a mystery. Indeed, the man himself cultivates an enigmatic image, eschewing interviews and seeking to draw a discreet veil over precisely what he got up to during the Saddam era.

A short, stocky man in his early fifties, Mohan, who has five children, is a secular Shiite Muslim who is said to have studied at the prestigious Baghdad military academy before moving up the ranks of the Iraqi army. His career, like that of so many of his peers, came to an abrupt halt in the mid-1990s when he fell out with Saddam and found himself incarcerated at Abu Ghraib, where he was tortured.

His experience has given him an abiding aversion to torture, which in itself is something of a rarity for an Iraqi in a position of authority. In a rare interview after taking control of Basra palace from the British, Mohan recalled that torture was routine at Abu Ghraib, and immensely damaging.

'I haven't allowed that in my force to the best of my ability. I know that is easy to say, but I try to be in charge of specific investigations,' he insisted. 'At the end torture is pointless, people will confess to anything to avoid further pain. I know I did. All I asked in return was to get a message to my family saying how much I cared for them before I died.'

That is not to say Mohan is a soft touch. Far from it. Mohan, who was personally appointed by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to restore order in the troubled south of the country, is particularly critical of the 15,000-strong police force which is supposed to be responsible for maintaining security in the city.

In Mohan's view the police force is corrupt and has been infiltrated by the local militias. Together with General Jalil Shuwayl, another Maliki appointee who has been given special responsibility for the police, Mahon is trying to root out the more corrupt officers and make the force fully accountable to the local people, a campaign that has so far resulted in two abortive assassination attempts on Jalil's life.

Even so, there is no denying that Mohan has had a tremendous impact on containing the endemic violence in Basra, so much so that his name is frequently cited by British commanders as an example of what can be achieved if Iraqis are allowed to take control of their own destiny.

'The Iraqis' tolerance of a foreign occupying force was always going to be very limited,' a senior British officer remarked when I visited the air base compound. 'They are far more likely to respond when an Iraqi officer gives them orders than a British or American.'

This simple statement could be taken as a summation of everything that has gone wrong in Iraq over the past four years. If only the Coalition could have found a way to promote the likes of Mohan to positions of authority, the fiercely nationalistic Iraqis would not have felt compelled to support the bloody insurgency that was primarily aimed at driving the occupying forces out of the country.

Mohan himself is well aware of the deepseated antipathy many Iraqis feel towards the Coalition, and for this reason has steadfastly refused to call upon the British to provide reinforcements on those occasions when there has been an upsurge of violence, such as the recent suicide bomb attack on a Sunni mosque.

This, of course, is one of the reasons why Gordon Brown feels he can get away with reducing the strength of the British deployment to Basra to the bare minimum — to around 2,500 by next spring. But placing so much trust in Mohan's relatively inexperienced and poorly equipped army is a risky strategy. The Iraqis — in southern Iraq, at least — may have tired of trying to kill American and British soldiers, but have they tired of killing each other?